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CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
IVENTIETH BIETHDAY 
 
 THE ATHEN^UM. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JOHN C. FKANCI8, 
 
 ATBENJSOil OFFICE, 
 BREAM'S BUILDINGS, CHANCERY LANE, E.C 
 
THE ATHENAEUM 
 
 Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, 
 the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama. 
 
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 LONDON : 
 
 JOHN C. FRANCIS, 
 
 ATHMN^UM OFFICE, 
 BREAM'S BDILDINGS, CHANCE KY LANE, E.G. 
 
THE SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE ATHENJIUM. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tile Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031473436 
 
THE SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 'ATHEN/EUM.' 
 
 [From the Athenceum of January 1, 1898.] 
 
 To-day is the seventieth birthday of the 
 Athenceum. Analogies drawn between the 
 career of a man and the career of a journal 
 are generally superficial and misleading, 
 for nothing but continuity of tradition can 
 make an organic whole of any journal's 
 life, howsoever vigorous that life may have 
 been. In most of the journals of Europe — 
 literary, scientific, political, or social — there 
 has occurred at intervals a solution of that 
 continuity without which no aggregation 
 of parts can ever become a whole. 
 Indeed, the vicissitudes of periodicals are 
 proverbial. How often does it happen that 
 a journal which has for years been running 
 on certain well-recognized lines becomes 
 suddenly subject to a cataclysm by which 
 all is changed ! Sometimes a change of pro- 
 prietor and sometimes a change of editor 
 will transmute the old paper into a new 
 
'J THE ATHEN.33UM. 
 
 one, nothing being left but the name, which 
 too often becomes misleading. Every view 
 the journal has hitherto taken, every sen- 
 tence it has hitherto uttered, will probably 
 be in direct antagonism to its new creed. 
 There is no need to give instances of this ; 
 every reader can furnish them for himself. 
 Now it is because the Athenxum has been 
 subject to none of these vicissitudes that 
 between its career and that of a man there 
 is a certain unique analogy. 
 
 Within two years of the time when Silk 
 Buckingham started it (in 1828), it passed 
 into the hands of a member of the family 
 that now owns it, a man whose principles, 
 ethical and literary, were exactly those which 
 have guided it ever since. Independence 
 was its watchword then, as independence is 
 its watchword now. In the literary arena 
 of that time there was a great dragon 
 which the Athenaum went out to kill, exactly 
 as to-day the Athencsum goes out to kill 
 the contemporary and smaller dragons by 
 which that arena is infested. In every 
 department of human activity there is a 
 dragon of some kind which prevents the 
 native energy of the competitor from getting 
 free scope and fair play. Nature is infinite 
 in the riches she squanders upon man; so 
 infinite, indeed, that among all the millions 
 of men, women, and children on this earth, 
 each one is as marvellously an individual — 
 as marvellously unlike any other individual 
 — as if he had just wandered from the canals 
 of the planet Mars. Nor is this all: as 
 regards function, each of these individuals 
 has gifts that make him a specialist ; each 
 one is organized to do well something worth 
 doing if society will afford him a chance. 
 But there are dragons in the way of each. 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 3 
 
 One man, for instance, is meant by Nature 
 for a soldier, and is fit for nothing else ; but 
 there is the dragon of our military system 
 standing in the way. Hence the chances 
 are that he becomes not a good soldier, 
 but a muddle - headed lawyer or a 
 " queer " priest. Another is born with that 
 love of arithmetic and accounts which is 
 such a marvel to those who detest figures, 
 as poets generally do ; but there stands 
 some dragon in the way which prevents the 
 bom accountant from becoming a banker 
 or something of that kind. If such a man 
 is driven to turn his energies to something 
 else — especially if he turns them to painting 
 pictures or writing verses — he becomes a 
 bore to himself, and to the Athenceum critic 
 a woe indeed. 
 
 Another man is born neither for soldier- 
 ing nor for making laws nor for making up 
 passbooks, but for that other kind of book- 
 making of which Scripture tells us " there is 
 no end," and in the way of this kind of man 
 seventy years ago there stood a dragon. 
 His name, as Mr. John C. Francis's mono- 
 graph reminds us, was Trade Criticism. 
 Of that particular monster this is Charles 
 Wentworth Dilke's own description : — 
 
 "The faithful chronicle of all that is interest- 
 ing to the Poet and the Philosopher is sought to 
 be preserved in the columns of the Athenmum; 
 and for the integrity of its Reviews it has, in 
 these oppressive days, obtained almost a chival- 
 rous character. It is a matter of notoriety that 
 the principal literary papers are the mere bellows 
 to the great publishing forges, and are used but 
 to puff the works as they go on. The Athenceum 
 asserts, and will maintain, its independence. It 
 is under the influence of no Publisher, and is in 
 no way swayed by the trade winds that carry 
 
4 THE ATHENiEUM. 
 
 all other craft along with them The Readers 
 
 of this Journal may be assured that the great 
 cause of truth and intelligence which is sought 
 to be advocated in these columns will, in the 
 days to come, experience but a sincerer and 
 more earnest partizan in the Athenceum." 
 
 Of all the dragons that ever stood in the 
 way of the man of letters who had neither 
 influence nor money, the Dragon of Trade 
 Oriticism was surely the most pestiferous. 
 There had really been more hope for the 
 " outside writing man," without such privi- 
 leges as money or connexion can buy, 
 when he confronted the eighteenth century 
 Dragon of Patronage than then when he 
 con&onted the dragon that the Athetneum 
 was to slay. Yes, all things considered, 
 it was less difficult in the time of Dr. 
 Johnson for the man of letters without con- 
 nexions, money, or inflnpnce to find a patron 
 than for such a man, at the time when the 
 Athenieum was started, to find a powerful 
 publisher who would get his book puffed 
 by the hired " bellows " of criticism as weU 
 as buy it. 
 
 As bravely, however, as Beowulf sallied 
 out to kill the " fire-drake " and killed it, 
 as bravely as Guy of Warwick sallied out 
 to kiU the Northumbrian dragon and 
 killed it, as bravely as Sir John Lambton 
 sallied out to kill the Lambton Worm and 
 killed it, so bravely the Athenaeum, sallied 
 out to kill the Dragon of Trade Oriticism 
 and killed it. But who knows how many 
 a " mute, inglorious Milton " may have 
 perished before the Ath«naum put lance in 
 rest to give bard and bardling that freedom 
 of play which Nature demands for all? 
 And what has been the result of that 
 " mighty slaying "? 
 
SEVJi^NTIETH BIETHDAY. 5 
 
 If nowadays a man of real literary ability 
 should be unable to find favour with one of 
 the more important {)ublishing houses, and 
 if in consequence he should have to secure 
 the services of the least important publisher 
 in Loudon, he need not fear lest his book 
 should lose any chances of succes§ from that 
 fact. The "bellows" of trade criticism 
 being broken, his book will be judged on 
 its merits, without the smallest reference to 
 the publishing house that brings it out. 
 Perhaps it. is the sweet remembrance of this 
 fact that explains the a:Sectionate way in 
 which the minor bard speaks, or ought to . 
 speak, of the Athenwum. Without the aid of 
 the Athenceum many of his own interesting 
 fraternity Could never have found public 
 utterance at all. And although we are 
 keeping the seventieth birthday of that 
 venerable dragon-slayer he is as full of fight 
 as ever — so f uU that, like the aged Beowulf, 
 when any new foe appears in the shape of 
 dishonest " Log - roller," venal " Smart 
 Slasher," or vulgar " Interview-monger," 
 he brushes aside aU younger warrior-heroes, 
 and says, " Leave him to me." 
 
 Our business, however, is not to sing the 
 praises of the Athenaeum as a dragon-slayer. 
 It is to discuss the question of that unity 
 and continuity of tradition which sets the 
 Athenceum apart from all other journals. 
 Not that a man or a journal deserves honour 
 for having made no change of opinion. 
 It is the fool, and not the wise man, upon 
 whom the lesson of life has worked so 
 slight an effect that his opinions have 
 suffered no change. But the laws of 
 cause and effect in literary art are, as 
 we have often said, unchangeable and 
 eternal. The great writers, whether of 
 
THE ATHEN^OUM. 
 
 Greece, Italy, England, or Germany, shine 
 with the same kind of light ; like the fixed 
 stars, they are all akin. The Atheneeum has 
 never mistaken any one of these luminaries 
 for a meteor, though, not being infallible, it 
 may occasionally have gazed through its 
 amiable glass at a meteor like Alexander 
 Smith and hailed him for a new " unfold- 
 ing star." Ask any reader of the Athenxum 
 ■when the following words about Tennyson 
 appeared in its columns; he will say, " Pro- 
 bably last week." They appeared in 1829. 
 " We have never before," it said, 
 
 "seen iv prize poem which indicated really first- 
 rate poetical genius, and which wuuld huvo done 
 honour to any man that ever wrote. Such 
 we do not hesitate to affirm is the little work 
 before us." 
 
 It then gives a well-selected extract of some 
 length from the poem, and winds up a 
 thoroughly appreciative notice with the 
 wordf, " How many men for a century who 
 have lived could have equalled this ? " 
 
 But what the A thenaum specially claims to 
 have inherited without change from the tra- 
 ditions of its founders is that deep sense 
 of the enormous responsibility of anony- 
 mous criticism which is seen in every line 
 contributed by the Maurice and Sterling 
 group who spoke through its columns. 
 ^Vhile in a signed aitiule the things said 
 have the power of the utterer's voice and 
 none other, in an unsigned article the 
 speaker is clothed with all the authority of 
 the journal in which he writes. Even for 
 those who are behind lhe scenes and know 
 that the critique expresses the opinion of 
 only one writer it is difficult not to be 
 impressed by the accent of authority in 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 7 
 
 the editorial " we." But with regard to 
 the general public, the reader of a review 
 article finds it impossible to escape from 
 the authority of the " we," and the power 
 of a single writer to benefit or to injure 
 an author is so great that none but the 
 most deeply conscientious men ought to 
 enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. 
 These were the views of Maurice and Ster- 
 ling i .and that they are shared by aU the 
 best writers of our time there can be no 
 doubt. Some very illustrious men have 
 given very emphatic expression to them. 
 On a certain memorable occasion, at a 
 little dinner - party at 16, Cheyne Walk, 
 one of the guests related an anecdote of his 
 having accidentally met an old acquaintance 
 who had deeply disgraced himself, and told 
 how he had stood " dividing the swift mind " 
 as to whether he could or could not offer 
 the man his hand. " I think I should have 
 offered him mine," said Eossetti, " although 
 no one detests his offence more than I do " ; 
 and then the conversation ran upon the 
 question as to the various kinds of offenders 
 with whom old friends could not shake 
 hands. " There is one kind of miscreant," 
 said Eossetti, " whom you have forgotten 
 to name — a miscreant who in kind of mean- 
 ness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the 
 man who in an anonymous journal tells 
 the world that a poem or picture is bad 
 when he knows it to be good. That is 
 the man who should never defile my hand 
 by his touch. By God, if I met such a man 
 at a dinner-table I must not kick him, I 
 suppose ; but I could not, and would not, 
 taste bread and salt with him. I would quietly 
 e;et up and go." Tennyson, on afterwards 
 being told this story, said : — " And who would 
 
8 THE ATHENiBUM. 
 
 not do the same ? — Such a man has heen 
 guilty of sacrilege — sacrilege against art." 
 Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the 
 first volume of the Athenceum worked on the 
 great principle thatthecritic'sprimary duty is 
 to seek and to bring to light those treasures 
 of art and literature that the husy world 
 is only too apt to pass by. Their pet 
 abhorrence was the cheap smartness of 
 .Tpffrey and certain of his coadjutors ; and 
 from its commencement the Athenceum has 
 striven to avoid slashing and smart writing. 
 A difficult thing to avoid, no doubt, for 
 nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent 
 and vulgar slashing which the half-educated 
 amateur thinks so clever. Of all forms 
 of writing, the founders of the Athenceum 
 held the shallow smart style to be the 
 cheapest and also the most despicable. And 
 here again the views of the Athenaum have 
 remained unchanged. The critic who works 
 "without a conscience or an aim" knows 
 only too well that it pays to pander to the 
 most lamentable of all the weaknesses of 
 human nature — the love that people have 
 of seeing each other attacked and vilified ; 
 it pays for a time until it defeats itself. For 
 although man has a strong instinct for 
 admiration — else had he never reached his 
 present position in the conscious world — he 
 has, running side by side with this instinct, 
 another strong instinct — the instinct for 
 contempt. A reviewer's ridicule poured 
 upon a writer titillates the reader with a 
 sense of his own superiority. It is by 
 pandering to this lower instinct that the 
 unprincipled journalist hopes to kill two 
 birds with one stone — to gratify his own 
 malignity and low - bred love of insolence, 
 and to make profit while doing so. Although 
 
SEVENTIETH BIETaDA^Y. 9 
 
 cynicism may certainly exist alongside great 
 talent, it is far more likely to be found 
 -where there is no talent at all. Many 
 brilliant ■writers have -written in this 
 journal, but rarely, if ever, have truth 
 and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for 
 a smart saying. One of these writers — the 
 greatest wit of the nineteenth century — 
 used to say, in honest disparagement of 
 Mhat were considered his own prodigious 
 powers of wit, " I will engage in six 
 lessons to teach any man to do this kind 
 of thing as well as I do, if he thinks 
 it worth his while to learn." And the 
 Athenteum at the time when Hood was 
 reviewing Dickens in its columns could 
 have said the same thing. The smart 
 reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for 
 wit, and among the low-minded insolence 
 needs no teaching. When, however, the 
 AthencBum took upon itself the task of 
 slashing the slasher, as in Maurice's famous 
 onslaught upon Jeffrey, it knew well how to 
 lay on the whip. The following words are 
 about the mildest in the article : — 
 
 "In criticism, before Mr. Jeffrey became 
 notorious for his attempts to philosophize upon 
 poetry, this country had been fed upon such 
 weak and mawkish spo(m meat. that it is no 
 wonder we did not for some time discover how 
 really vague, unsubstantial, and unsatisfactory 
 weru the speculations of this celebrated author. 
 Any one who looks back to his writings from 
 the vantage ground on which we now stand will 
 readily perceive that, under a considerable ap- 
 pearance of freshness and novelty, and of a ten- 
 dency to look at poetry-in connexion with the 
 nature of the human mind, instead of with the 
 rules of the critics, there is really to be found 
 little more than an elaborate attention to details, 
 a wish r<> conciliate the appearance of originality 
 
10 THE ATHENAEUM. 
 
 with a real determination to oppose no popular 
 prejudice, and a want of any fine discrimination 
 between the essential characteristics of great 
 authors. His disgraceful obstinacy in depre- 
 ciating Wordsworth and exaggerating the merits 
 of various men of undeniable elegance of mind, 
 but of no creative power whatsoever, is lament- 
 able proof of wilfulness and prejudice. He has 
 given us no tolerable estimate of the merits of 
 any living poet, except, perhaps, Mr. Moore, 
 whom his mind is exactly calculated to appre- 
 ciate. In this case, the want of profoundness, 
 both of thought and feeling, in the critic, be- 
 comes of less importance, from the absence of 
 anything in the poet on which it could be exer- 
 cised ; while all Mr. Jeffrey's liveliness, pretti- 
 ness, and neatness of mind are brought into full 
 play by the corresponding qualities in the object 
 of his admiration." 
 
 In these strictures by F. D. Maurice there 
 is nothing that can be challenged, save what 
 is said about Moore's being the only poet 
 ■whom Jeffrey could appreciate. It is to 
 Jeffrey's everlasting honour that he fully 
 understood and warmly admired the re- 
 markable genius of George Crabbe, the 
 greatest " modernity " poet that has ap- 
 peared since Villon. It is odd, by-the-bj', 
 that in these days, when there is again 
 some talk about the poetry of realism 
 ("modernity"), Crabbe's name is never 
 mentioned. 
 
 There is no work of imagination, howsoever 
 high, that cannot easily be turned into ridicule, 
 as we see by reading the critiques in some 
 of the leading critical organs of the day upon 
 Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. 
 It was against such criticism as this that the 
 Athenceum from the first set its face. We 
 will not here go over the story of the attacks 
 that embittered Keats's life, and gave pain 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 11 
 
 to Shelley, and tried hard to shut out Words- 
 worth, from the suffrages of the world, but 
 will offer a few remarks upon the attitude 
 that was taken up in the first volume of 
 the Athenieum in regard to one poem of 
 Coleridge's, ' Christabel.' Owing to Jeffrey's 
 having admitted into his review that in- 
 famous onslaught upon ' Christabel ' which 
 is a standing disgrace to English criticism — 
 a standing disgrace, indeed, to the literary 
 character — it became the foolish fashion to 
 gfibe at it. In an article on ' Christabel ' 
 and its critics which appeared in the Athe- 
 nieum of July 2nd, 1828 — an article which 
 is specially interesting from the fact that 
 it quotes from an early unrevised edition 
 of the poem certain lovely verses that were 
 afterwards omitted by the poet — the 
 critic says boldly what everybody dare say 
 now, that the very qualities in the poem 
 which to the man of prose are the subject 
 of ridicule are the qualities which have 
 given immortality to the greatest imagina- 
 tive work of the world : — 
 
 " The very first lines of ' Christabel ' are 
 frequently selected as objects of ridicule. Be 
 it remembered that they are the opening of a 
 tale of witchery ; and that unless they are read 
 in that good faith and singleness of heart with 
 which a child would listen to such a story, they 
 are not heard with the predisposition to which 
 alone the author addressed himself : — 
 
 'Tis the middle of iilf;fat by the caatle clock. 
 And the uwIb have awaken'd the crowing cock ; 
 
 Tn— whit ! Tu who ! 
 
 And bark, again ! the crowing cnck. 
 
 How drowBily it crew. 
 
 Sir Leoline. the Baron rich, 
 
 Hath a toothless nvastiff bitch ; 
 
 From her kennel, beneath the rock. 
 
 She makes answer to the clock. 
 
 Four for the quarters, and twelve fcr the hoir 
 
 Ever and aye. moonshine or shower. 
 
 .Sixteen short howls, not over loud ; 
 
 Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. 
 
12 THE ATHENE UM. 
 
 Now, I confess, I do not see what there is more 
 absurd in this than in the croaking raven of 
 "Virgil ; or, though it be talked of as the 
 drivelling folly of Bottom, why it is a whit less 
 dignified than the song of Puck, 
 
 Whilst the scritch'owlj scritching loud, 
 Futa the wretch that lies in woe. 
 In remembrance of a shroud ; 
 
 or, again, than the lay of " Winter," 
 
 When nightly sings the staring owl, 
 
 Tu— whu ; 
 Tu— whit ; Tu— whu. 
 
 I avow that these verses seem to me admirably 
 calculated for bringing before the reader the 
 ' witching hour of night,' with all that thrilling 
 and ghost ridden feeling which is the proper 
 recipient of the mysterious story. And as to 
 the boarding-school-miss delicacy about the 
 gender of the mastiff, we hear no objection 
 to Cowper's phrase of 
 
 Kilwfck's echoing wood, 
 Where oft the bitch-fox hides her hapless brood. 
 
 And judging from the analogy of human beings, 
 and from long and general tradition, an ancient 
 female of the dog species is as likely to be 
 distinguished above the male by supernatural 
 endowments, and intimacy with the foul fiend, 
 as is confessedly the case among human beings. 
 In the succeeding lines there is nothing to 
 observe upon (except their exquisite and pic- 
 torial beauty) unless, with a certain notorious 
 critic, I were to remark the phrase in the third 
 of these lines : — 
 
 she had dreams all yesternight 
 Of her own betrothed knight ; 
 Dreams that made her moan and leap. 
 As on her bed she lay in sleep. 
 
 The critic who has objected to the employment 
 of the word 'leap ' as an expression for the rest- 
 lessness occasioned by a painful dream might 
 perhaps be puzzled to reply if he were asked 
 why it is inappropriate. The next lines to these 
 are beautiful specimens of a kind of excellence 
 which runs through the whole poem — the pre- 
 sentation, namely, of the clearest and brightest 
 pictures by the smallest u\imber of words : — 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 13 
 
 Sltp stole along, she nothing spoke, 
 
 The hrefzps ihey were still also; 
 And nought whs gteen upon the oak. 
 
 But muBs and rarest mistletoe : 
 She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 
 And in silence prayeth she. 
 
 A hundred stanzas of details would not make 
 plainer the terror and devotion of the lovely 
 lady and' the silent dimness of the ancient oak." 
 
 And this is so entirely in harmony with 
 what the Athenceum now says about Coleridge 
 that it might have appeared in these 
 columns last week. 
 
 In estimating the literary insight of a 
 journal started in 1828, the first and the 
 chief thing is, of course, to inquire what 
 were its views of Wordsworth, Southey, 
 Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, 
 and Moore. It is easy enough for people 
 nowadays to have clear views upon the 
 relative positions of these poets. Some 
 readers of their work give preference to one 
 of them and some to another. They have 
 all been long dead, and the personal equa- 
 tion is also dead. But in 1828 they were 
 all living except Byron, Shelley, and Keatf , 
 and partisanship was in relation to them all 
 very strong. What has time done with the 
 judgments of the Athenceum upon these ? 
 In the first volume of the Athenmum Maurice 
 wrote appreciations of Wordsworth, Southey, 
 Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Moore ; and it is 
 remarkable that the position assigned to 
 each of these poets is exactly the same as 
 the Athenmum assigns to them to-day. Take, 
 for instance, his remarks upon Wordsworth. 
 Since these were made, the study of Words- 
 worth has passed into a religion, and yet 
 but few better things have been said about 
 him as poet, artist, and thinker than are to 
 be found in this article written seventy 
 years ago : — 
 
14 THE ATHEN/EUM. 
 
 "He pours into his personages the strong 
 life and moving breath of genius ; but they 
 have little of the air of the mart or the farm- 
 yard. They have, indeed, all that which is so 
 completely wanting in the lieroes of Lord Byron, 
 the absolute truth of being, the nature which 
 is so uniform under so many varieties ; they 
 are made up of the elements of univeMal, but 
 want the accidents of social, humanity. Words- 
 worth appears to take no pleasure in watching 
 the entangled threads of passion which bind 
 together crowds with such many-coloured, yet 
 scarcely distinguishable feelings. He retires 
 from the conflict of mingled and heterogeneous 
 interests. He loves to muse by winding rivers ; 
 but the tumultuous current of men's ordinary 
 motives has little for his contemplation. He 
 delights to gaze upon cities ; but it is when ' all 
 
 that mighty heart is lying still.' He diffuses 
 
 his affections over everything around him, and 
 lets them be restricted by no arbitrary limits, 
 and confined within no sectarian enclosures. 
 He looks round upon the world and upon man 
 with eyes of serene rejoicing, and traces all 
 the workings of that spirit of good of whose 
 influence he is conscious in his own heart. But 
 from his want of that mastery over forms which 
 was never possessed so perfectly by any one as 
 by Shakspeare he cannot make so intelligible 
 to all men as he otherwise might the depth and 
 
 value of his own feelings Like those angels 
 
 who are made a flame of fire, he burns with a 
 calm and holy light, and the radiance which 
 shows so strange amid the contrasted glare and 
 blackness of the present will blend with the dawn- 
 ing of a better time as with its native substance." 
 
 The same may be said of Maurice's re- 
 marks upon Shelley, the general estimate 
 of whose work at that time was so different 
 from the general estimate of it now, when 
 enthusiastic students of it have to be re- 
 primandfed occasionally for their too liberal 
 " chatter about Shellev " : — 
 
SEYENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 15 
 
 " We do not say that lie wrote better poetry 
 than Coleridge or Wordsworth, bnt that more 
 habitually than they, or, indeed, than any one 
 else we can remember, he thought and felt 
 poetically. He cannot be conceived as perform- 
 ing the most ordinary action and not investing 
 it with a wild gracefulness or imaginative splen- 
 dour. Other men put out their minds into the 
 task of ideal creation with something of effort 
 and preparation ; they bare their arms for the 
 wrestling, or gird their loins for the combat. 
 But Shelley seems to have been always and all 
 over poet. He did not delay to put on armour 
 for the battle, but went forth in the naked 
 beauty of that form which was in itself in- 
 vulnerable, and with a glory blazing on his 
 brow. 
 
 'A/i<^i Se 06 K€<l>aX.y vec^os ecrrei^e S?a OeaiDV 
 )(pv(T(ov, (K S'avTOV Safe (jiXoya TrafitjjavouxTav. 
 
 His whole being seems to have been absorbed 
 and transfigured into poetry ; and though the 
 sphere of his writings is as different from ' this 
 dim spot, which men call earth, ' as are the clouds 
 of sunset from the world with whose horizon 
 they mingle, yet it is not a region to which he 
 was borne on the wings of a casual enthusiasm, 
 but his fatherland and accustomed home. He 
 did not first look at an object as it seems to 
 other men, and then consider how it might be 
 represented so as to please in poetry ; but his 
 very perceptions seem to have been modified 
 and exalted by his genius, and even his senses 
 were inspired. It is on this account that his 
 poems have such perfect unity of feeling. His 
 labours do not show those inconsistencies which 
 arise among other men from the variable humour 
 and energy of the moment. They are but a 
 homogeneous fragment of the permanent sub- 
 stance of his mind. Many may have felt that 
 he has too completely thrown away the ordinary 
 vestures of human nature that he may or 
 himself with asphodel, and array his limbs in 
 light ; but no one can have mistaken him for an 
 ordinary masker, who assumes successively a 
 
16 THE ATHENiEUM. 
 
 dozen different disguises, and weiirs none of 
 them as if it were his proper garb." 
 
 On the other hand, if we read what Maurice 
 Says about the poetry of another man, whose 
 work was in certain quarters as absurdly 
 extolled as Shelley's work was absurdly 
 depreciated, we shall be startled by the 
 judicial nature of the criticism : — 
 
 "Mr. Moore is the writer who would be 
 cited, if any were, as a contradiction to our 
 statement that Irulaiid has never nourished a 
 great pi let. But there are so many substantial 
 reasons against his claim, that it is not difficult 
 to show its insufiiuiency. His poems are de- 
 ficient in the first great requisite, that which 
 ought to be the groundwork, or, as it were, the 
 very spirit of their beauty, truth. If we look 
 merely at their imagery, at the pictures of 
 outward objects which they display to us, it is 
 clear that in this they are found wanting. It 
 is not that he regards them through a difi'erently- 
 coloured atmosphere, or on a diflferent side, 
 from other men, but that he studiously and 
 elaborately represents them in a way in which 
 no one ever saw them. It is not that he brings 
 them too near him by a telescope, or exaniiiius 
 them too much in detail with a microscope, or 
 uses spectacles of green or purple, or looks at 
 the landscape through a pictured window of a 
 thousand difiTerent colours, or dims the glory of 
 the sun by a smoky glass ; but his very eye 
 seems facet-cut, made up of innumerable dif- 
 ferent angles and surfaces, here refracting a 
 ray, and there reflecting the corner of an 
 object, so that he perceives no consistent or 
 permanent appearance whatsoever, but lives in 
 a universe of sparkling points and fragments, 
 and wanders on from delusion to delusion. He 
 never gives us a representation of what is ; but, 
 as if the world had, some time or other, in its 
 childhood, chosen to put itself into masquerade, 
 and he had since got possession of the cast-off 
 finery, he arrays it anew in the tarnished tinsel 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 17 
 
 and old artificial flowers, and pompously exhibits 
 it, as if in mockery of things as they are. Every 
 one must have observed that, when we are 
 placed in some accidental position, a bit of 
 quartz or glass upon an open bank or distant 
 hill will ca'-ch the rays of the sun and shine 
 with a dazzling brightness. If Mr. Moore were 
 describing the landscape iu which this had 
 occurred to him, he would omit the broad blue 
 sky, the fields, the forests, the mountain, and 
 the lake, to dwell upon and exaggerate this 
 momentary and casual triviality, to illustrate it 
 by a thousand pretty images, and expand it 
 into a galaxy of splendour. His fancy never 
 looks abroad to great views ; his mind always 
 fixes upon some petty salient point, instead of 
 the whole. To get a notion of the heavens, it 
 follows the zigzag flight of a butterfly ; and 
 rather than contemplate the teeming profusion 
 of the earth in the general, it would hunt out 
 some single snail, and then grow witty about a 
 Frenchman's dinner, or Lord Eldon's decisions. 
 In this respect, he and a Chinese painter are 
 specimens of contrasted errors. The one de- 
 lineates on his jars and screens only a part of 
 what he sees, but frequently gives that part 
 with amazing fidelity ; though omitting, to be 
 sure, the light and shade, perspective, expres- 
 sion, and so forth. Mr. Moore adds to every- 
 thing he sees something of his own ; which ia 
 not only shown so prominently as to throw into 
 the background whatever scrap or angle of truth 
 there might at first have been, but which is 
 also utterly inconbistent with it." 
 
 And again, if we consider the pretensions 
 of Southey and those who were claiming 
 for him the place of a great epic poet, we 
 shall find the same courageous impartiality 
 of judgment as in regard to Moore : — 
 
 " Our readers then understand that we con- 
 sider Mr. Southey a poet of no higher than the 
 second order — a judgment which we have come 
 to when estimating him by his best and not by 
 
18 THE ATHEN^UM. 
 
 his worst poems, by ' Roderick ' and ' Kehama,' 
 not by the ' Vision of Judgment ' or the ' Tale 
 of Paraguay.' Tet, though we think his poetry 
 inferior to that of many other English authors, 
 it seems to us to display his mind in a more 
 nearly perfect state than we find it in any of his 
 other kinds of writing. As mere composition, 
 the verse is far from being so faultless as the 
 prose." 
 
 Maurice attempted no formal appreciation 
 of Byron and none of Keats, who were 
 pushed out of the series of essays by the 
 claims of Cobbett and Brougham. But the 
 criticisms of these two poets scattered 
 through the first volume of the Athenceum 
 are in entire harmony with the other studies 
 of poets. 
 
 The only great writer of his time to 
 whom Maurice in these appreciations fails 
 to do full justice is Scott. But this failure 
 seems to arise not from prejudice, but from 
 the deep unlikeness between the two men — 
 one so reflective, generalizing, and "sub- 
 jective," the other the most " objective " and 
 picturesque writer of the nineteenth century. 
 This is one of the few subjects in which the 
 Athenmum of to-day departs from the old 
 tradition of the journal. StiU, as will be 
 seen below, Maurice says some admirably 
 true things about Scott : — 
 
 "Sir Walter Scott is the greatest of observers. 
 He seeniB to be, like the spirits, all eye and 
 ear ; but, unlike them, he has scarcely arrived 
 at reflection, much less at intuition. He has 
 looked with a close and searching, and above 
 all, with a sympathetic eye, on everything 
 around him, living or inactive. He has watched 
 through the whole of his now waning life, (and 
 may its final close be far distant !) the looks, the 
 tunes, the lightest indications of passion among 
 men. He cannot be conceived as sitting for 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 19 
 
 even an hour in a stage-coach or a coffue-rooni 
 without having drawn out and measured the 
 characters of all his companions. Every sen- 
 sitive or irritable line about the lips, every hair 
 of the eyebrow upraised in the grimace and 
 frankness of foolish admiration, or drawn 
 together into the compressed strength of 
 thought, every pugnacious or friendly trembling 
 of the finger, — bring him but for five minutes 
 within view of them, and he has them noted, — 
 each of them the germ of a picture or the hint of 
 a personage. He is one of the few men of our 
 generation whom we may imagine actually going 
 forth like Shakspeare and Ben Jonson to ' take 
 humours ' ; and it is a shrewd and curious art, 
 in which he must, doubtless, be a thorough pro- 
 ficient : it is one in which a treasure of really 
 kind and generous feeling is of more use than 
 wealth or rank, or even than those other prime 
 requisites, caution and penetration. Seat him 
 in the circle round the kitchen fire of a country 
 alehouse, one of the blithest and most fertile 
 scenes of study for an humble wayfaring ob- 
 server, and it is impossible to doubt that Scott 
 would speedily win his way into the merry 
 affections of the whole party, find out the 
 secrets of a dozen rough-coated breasts, and 
 know who are the rich ones, who the brave 
 ones, who the beauty, and who the oracle of the 
 hamlet. The serving-maid would giggle while 
 she filled his tumbler, the landlady smooth her 
 apron with gracious attention while he spoke to 
 her, the farmer open his mouth with astonish- 
 ment at his knowledge of pigs and planting, the 
 smith shake the rafters with a roar when some 
 good-humoured jest had hit the dusty miller ; 
 and the most widely celebrated mind of modem 
 literature would become an intimate with plough- 
 men and be held in honour by chimney-corner 
 veterans. Or think of him benighted in some 
 lonely cottage, how would he praise the ale, lay 
 down a theory of peat-cutting, give grave advice 
 on the roasting of potatoes, and teach some 
 chubby-faced urchin to repeat a ballad or bawl 
 a Jacobite Psean." 
 
•20 THE ATHENiEUM. 
 
 The truth, seems to be that as the mere 
 manner of Scott's dialogue is apt at times 
 to become too bookish, Maurice took it 
 for granted, without inquiry, that on these 
 occasions the matter is also artificial. Scott 
 is sometimes so anxious to get on with his 
 story, that unless the characters are speak- 
 ing in Scots he does not stay to put into 
 colloquial idiom the substance of the thing 
 said, but jots it down in the first lumbering 
 prose sentences that come to hand. Had he 
 allowed himself time to revise these jottings 
 it would have been found that the substance 
 of the thing said is almost always right. 
 
 But it wUl not do to allow this account of 
 the past exploits of the Athenisum to carry 
 us too far, and so, instead of interesting our 
 readers, to bore them. Our excuse for making 
 it is that retrospects like this, so good in 
 the life- education of man the individual, 
 are no less good in the Ufe- education of a 
 journal. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the great 
 moralists of the ancient world — especially 
 of the Eastern world, such as Confucius, 
 Mencius, and the moralists of the Bible — 
 will remember that their minds were much 
 exercised with a question that nowadays 
 troubles nobody, What is the difference 
 between the wise man and the fool? If 
 we were required to find an answer to this 
 obsolete question, we should say that, in 
 the chariot race of life, the wise man is 
 the charioteer who at intervals looks back- 
 ward over the course, looks forward over the 
 course, and sees the running as a complete 
 picture. Prom the dangers and the triumphs 
 of the past he anticipates the dangers and 
 the triumphs of the future ; while the fool 
 does nothing but lash his steeds and tear 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 21 
 
 along. To change the metaphor, the fool's 
 life is a thing of shreds and patches, 
 a conglomeration of little bits, a disparate 
 medley of sleep-divided days. When he 
 gets up of a morning he awakes to a 
 new brief life of fourteen or sixteen hours, 
 and each of these daily lives is more or less 
 separated from the daily lives that went 
 before. No doubt he does in a way remem- 
 ber these daily lives, but it is pretty much 
 in the same way that a horse remembers 
 his antecedent days in harness and out. 
 To him and to the horse alike the scenery 
 of the past is like the scenery of dreamland. 
 It is an interesting mockery that has but 
 little to do with the journey ahead. To the 
 wise man the landscape of the past and the 
 landscape of the present are but two dis- 
 tricts of the same country, from which at 
 intervals he stands and gazes at the looming 
 perspective of the future. In a word, the 
 life of the wise man being fused into one 
 organic whole, he never grows old. The 
 rose of life keeps on blooming imtil the 
 shears close upon it. The life of the fool 
 is minced up into numberless little Hves by 
 those same nightly invasions of the wizard 
 Sleep, which the wise man uses as one of 
 his agents in fusing his little daUy lives into 
 one. The Athenteum, by retrospects such as 
 this, hopes to fuse its own little weekly lives 
 into one, and thus to grow wiser as it grows 
 older. 
 
 Oar principles in the future, however, 
 will be the same as they were in the past. 
 Though bad literature will not escape with- 
 out chastisement, our main attention wiU 
 still be directed to that which is good. 
 In criticizing imaginative literature, 
 
22 THE ATHEN^UM. 
 
 whether in prose or verse, our motto in 
 the future will be the same as the motto 
 of Maurice and Sterling, the noble words 
 of Queen Hippolyta in ' A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream,' " The best in this kind 
 are but shadows ; and the worst are no 
 worse if imagination amend them." For 
 though we reach to-day our seventieth 
 year, it must not be supposed that we are 
 old in any sense save that of the mere 
 passage of years. If any one should be 
 rude enough to say that in any other sense 
 we are old, we for once shall lose what 
 is called, or ought to be called, " Aihenmum 
 urbanity," and shall remind that person or 
 that journal, as the case may be, of that 
 aphorism of Goethe's in which he tells us that 
 an old camel, be he ever so travel-worn, 
 can stiU carry the burdens of many 
 donkeys. 
 
 Time was when at three score years and 
 ten a man was considered to have fully, and 
 more than fully, played his part ; but all 
 that is changed, as is proved by the 
 lives of some of the illustrious men of 
 our own age — such as Victor Hugo and 
 Tennyson, such as Bismarck, Moltke, and 
 Mr. Gladstone. And if human life can 
 thus bravely contradict the old idea that 
 at three score years and ten there is 
 necessarily any waning of man's intel- 
 lectual powers, is not the AthenceuwCs con- 
 tradiction of that sophism stronger still? 
 Nevertheless, as regards the human camel, 
 howsoever vigorous he may remain at the 
 age mentioned by the Psalmist, a seventieth 
 birthday is, even in these days of longevity, 
 a good time for pausing to take stock of 
 events. The time has then come for him 
 
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY. 23 
 
 to say to himself, " These emulous weight- 
 carriers, camels and donkeys, by my side 
 are some of them old and some of them 
 young, but as for me, it is a long time since 
 I was a foal, and I will begin to take stock 
 of the road with a view to the journey ahead." 
 To return to the metaphor of the chariot 
 race, when a driver has had as long a 
 run as the Athenceum achieves to-day, he 
 will (if years have brought him " the philo- 
 sophic mind ") pull up the well - worn 
 steeds for a little breathing, and look 
 back. Though the meaning of the race is 
 in these days as far from man's guessing 
 aa it was in the time of the first Pharaoh, 
 such a oharioteer, wise as well as old, 
 will by adopting this course learn at least 
 the art of running and the art of winning. 
 Many of those who started with him he will 
 miss; but each one that has fallen away 
 has been promptly replaced by another 
 competitor, as eager and as hopeful as any 
 one of those whose spokes and fellies are 
 scattered on the ground, and whose horses 
 are lying with legs outstretched, broken- 
 winded, spavined, or dead. 
 
 And so it is with the Atheneeum on its 
 seventieth birthday. We look back through 
 our career and recall the writers whose 
 talents have gone to make the journal what 
 it is — writers like Charles Lamb, Landor, 
 Thomas Hood, Maurice, Sterling, Carlyle, 
 Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Douglas Jerrold, Mrs. 
 Browning, Barry Cornwall, Mary Brother- 
 ton, Miss Strickland, Sydney DobeU, 
 Archbishop Whately, Westland Marston, 
 Faraday, Sir William Hamilton, Sir Charles 
 Lyell, and the rest. We remember the 
 rise and fall ol smart journal after smart 
 
24 THE ATHEN^UM. 
 
 journal, whose audaraty or whose insolence 
 or whose fireworks were to illuminate the 
 course and eclipse all those old-fashioned 
 drivers with the dull motto of " honesty and 
 fair play . " We look back, and we remember 
 these things, and the future seems full of 
 hope. 
 
 1.0SD0K ; 
 
 PKINTED BY JOHN EDWARD FKANCIb, 
 
 ATHEN^UM PRESS. 
 
 1898. 
 
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'A FASCINATING PAGE OF LITERARY HISTORY." 
 
 Illustrated Z'Ondon. Nerr$. 
 
 In 2 vols, crown 8vo. with 2 Portraits, 24». 
 
 JOHN FRANCIS AND THE ' ATHEN^UM.' 
 
 A Literary Chronicle of Half a Century. 
 By JOHN C. FRANCIS. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " We have put before us a valuable collection of materials for the future history of the 
 Victoriaa era of Eoglish literature." — Standard. 
 
 "This literary chrouicle of half a century must at once, or iq course of a short time, 
 take a place as a permaaeat work of reference," — Publishers' Circular. 
 
 "The volumes abound with curious and interesting statements, and in bringing before 
 the public the most notable features of a distinguished journal from its infancy almost to 
 the present hour, Mr. Francis deserves the thanks of all readers interested In literature." 
 
 Spectator, 
 "No memoir of Mr. Francis would be complete without a corresponding history of the 
 
 journal with which his name will for ever be identified The excraordioaty variety of 
 
 subjects and persons referred to, embracing as they do every event in literature, and 
 referring to every person of distinccion in science or letters, is a record of such magnitude 
 that we can only indicate its imtlines. To the literary historian the volumes will be of 
 incalculable service." — Bookseller, 
 
 " The book is, in fact, as it is described, a literary chronicle of the period with which it 
 deals, and a chronicle put together with as much skill as taste and discrimination. The 
 information given about notable people of the past is always interesting and often piquant, 
 while it rarely fails to throw some new light on the individuality of the person to whom it 
 refers." — Liverpool Daily Post. 
 
 " It is in characters so sterling and admirable as this that the real strength of a nation 
 
 lies Tbe public will find in tne book reading which, if light and easy, is also full of 
 
 interest and suggestion We suspect that writers for the daily and weekly papers will 
 
 find out that itis convenient to keep these volumes of handy size, and each having its own 
 index, extending the one to 30 the other to 30 pages, at their elbow for reference." 
 
 Liverpool Mercury, 
 "Our survey has been unavoidably confined almost exclusively to the first volume; 
 indeed, aaythiog like an adequate account of the book is impossible, for it may be described 
 as a history la notes of the literature of the period with which it deals. We confess that 
 we have been able to find very few pages altogether barren of interest, and by far the larger 
 portion of the book will be found irresistibly attractive by all who care anything for the 
 history of literature in our own time." — Manchester Examiner. 
 
 "No other fifty years of English literature contain so mu'sh to interest an Bnglish 
 reader."— iceman. 
 
 " A mine of information on subjects connected with literature for the last fifty years;" 
 
 Echo. 
 "Rich in literary and social interest, and afford a comprehensive survey of the 
 intellectual progress of the n&tion,"^ Leeds Mercury. 
 
 London: RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, 
 
 NEW BURLINGTON STREET, W., 
 PublU/ters in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Qtieen. 
 
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 arW8636 
 
 Seventieth birthday of the Athenaeum. 
 
 3 1924 031 473 436 
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