BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF iienrg HJ. Sage 1891 .4-/17^^.9 j^/cr//?^, Cornell University Library PN 511.C71 Ephemera critica 3 1924 026 071 765 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026071765 EPHEMERA CRITICA EPHEMERA CRITICA OR PLAIN TRUTHS ABOUT CURRENT LITERATURE BY JOHN CHURTON COLLINS Non verebor nominare singulos, quo facilius, propositis exemplis, appareat, quibus gradibus fracta sit et deminuta eloquentia. — Dial, de Orat. aiviaiv alvrfrd, /iOfi^6,v S' 4iri fy)yyovav 'Epivvav. — Agamem., 1159-61, 62 AT THE UNIVERSITIES of a poet, tells us that it indicates "constancy."* Nothing is more common than to find elaborate critical comments on the Faerie Queen without the smallest reference to its connection with Aristotle's Ethics, and on Wordsworth's great Ode without any reference to Plato. But such is the confidence reposed in Professor Earle and his theory, and so determined are the legisla- tors for the new School to exclude all connection with classical literature, that it is not admitted even as a special subject. A candidate has, as we have seen, the option of studying the influence exercised on old English literature by French, and on later literature by Italian and German ; but the one thing which he has not the option of studying is the influence exercised on it by the literatures of Greece and Rome. Some of our readers may remember that a few years ago a public appeal was made for an expression of opinion on the question of associating the study of our own classics and that of the ancients. Opinions were elicited from many of the most dis- tinguished men in England. They were all but unanimous, not merely in supporting the associa- tion, but in deprecating the severance. So wrote Mr. Gladstone, Cardinal Manning, Professor Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Lord Lytton, Mr. John Morley, Walter Pater, AddingtonSymonds ; so • For ample illustration of this, see infra the review of the Clarendon Press edition of Shelley's Adonais. 63 ENGLISH LITERATURE wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, the Rector of Lincoln, the President of Magdalen, the Warden of All Souls, and many others. We may add, also — for we are now at liberty to state it publicly — that this was emphatically the opinion of Robert Brown- ing. We cannot, of course, quote these opinions in extenso,^ and that of the late Professor Jowett and a portion of that of Mr. John Morley must suffice. I am as strongly of opinion that in an Honour School of English. Literature or Modern Literature the subject should not be separated from classical literature, as I am of opinion that English literature should have a place in our curriculum. So writes Professor Jowett. It seems to me to be as impossible effectively to study English literature, except in close association with the classics, as it would be to grasp the significance of mediseval or modern institutions without reference to the political creations of Greece and Eome. I should be very sorry to see the study of Greek and Latin writers displaced, or cut off from the study of our own. So writes Mr. John Morley. But the Professor of Anglo-Saxon and his friends, as we have seen, think otherwise, and have, unhappily for the interests of letters and education, persuaded Oxford to think otherwise too. We say advisedly the interests of letters and ' They may all be found in full in a Pall Mall " Extra " (January, 1887), and in the present writer's Study of English Literature, 64 AT THE UNIVERSITIES education. For the precedent of excluding from a School of " Literature," and that at the chief centre and nursery of liberal culture, the Litera- tures of Greece and Rome cannot but be detri- mental to the vitality and influence of the ancient classics ; and, as Froude truly observed, both the national taste and the tone of the national intel- lect would suffer serious decline, if they lost their authority. The reaction against philological study which has set in during the last ten years has given them a new lease of life. But the spirit of the age is against them ; they have rivals in languages far easier to acquire ; they are not, and never can be, in touch with the many. Let them become disassociated from our curriculums of Literature, and they will cease to be influential, They will cease to be studied seriously, to be studied even in the original, except by mere scholars. Another absurdity, not less monstrous, in these regulations, is the absence of all provision for in- struction in the principles of criticism. There is indeed an unmeaning clause about the history of criticism, and of style in verse and prose, being included in the examination ; but as no- thing is specified, and as no work on criticism, with the exception of Dryden's Discourse on Epic Poetry, and Johnson's Lives (of eighteenth- century poets),^ is included in the books » It is amusing to notice how carefully the greater part of E.G. 65 B ENGLISH LITERATURE prescribed for special study, it is plain that this important subject has no place. Why it should not have occurred to these legislators to sub- stitute, say, for Goldsmith's Citizen of the World and Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents, som.e work which would at least have opened the eyes of the literary professors of the future to the existence of philosophical criticism, is certainly odd. Had they prescribed select essays from Hume ; and Shaftesbury's Advice to an Author, or Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, or Burke's Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, or even the critical portions of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, with the two essays of Wordsworth, it would have been something. But the truth is that, as they have excluded, except from the optional subjects, all literatures but the English, one absurdity has involved thera in another. The course for the literary education of our future professors, proceeding on the principle that they need know no language but Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, has necessitated the elimination of all the great what is most precious and instructive in Johnson's work, the lives namely of Cowley and Di-yden, and the noble critique of Paradise Lost, is expressly excluded, and the greater part of what is most trivial, and regarded hy himself as trivial, the lives of the minor poets of the eighteenth century, selected instead. Macaulay ranks the lives of Cowley and Dryden, with that of Pope, as the masterpieces of the work; and Johnson himself considered the life of Cowley to be the best. 66 AT THE UNIVEESITIES masterpieces of critical literature. As they are assumed to know no Greek, they can have no serious instruction in such works as Aristotle's Poetic and Rhetoric, and in the Treatise on the Sublime. As they are assumed to know no Latin, they can have no instruction in Roman criticism. On the same principle such works as Lessing's Laocoon and Hamhurgische Drama- turgie, Schiller's ^sthetical Letters and Essays, Villemain's Lectures, and Sainte-Beuve's Essays, can find no place in their curriculum of study. And so it comes to pass that Dryden's Dis- course on Epic Poetry and Johnson's Lives of the eighteenth-century poets, represent — proh pudor ! — the course in Criticism. Now it is not too much to say that, for a University like Oxford to confer an honour degree in English Literature on a student who need never have read a line of the works to which we have referred, is to authorize not simply superficiality, but sheer imposture. How can a teacher deal adequately even with the subject which these regulations profess to include — the history of criticism — who need have no acquaint- ance with the Poetic and Rhetoric, the Treatise on the Sublime, and the Institutes of Oratory ? How could a teacher possibly be a competent exponent and critic of the masterpieces of our literature, who had not received a proper critical training, and how could he have any preten- sion to such a training when all that is best in 67 ENGLISH LITERATURE criticism had been expressly excluded from his education ? It may be urged that he would himself supply these deficiencies, that the study of our own Literature would naturally lead him to the study of other Literatures, that intelligent curiosity, ambition, or a sense of shame would induce him to supplement voluntarily, and by his own efforts, what he needed in his profession. In some instances this would undoubtedly be the case. In the great majority of instances such a supposition would be against all analogy. As a general rule, a high honour degree in any subject represented at the Universities is final. It winds a man up for life. It determines, fixes, and colours his methods, his views, his tone, in all that relates to the subject in which he has graduated. If he chooses teaching as a pro- fession, he has no inducement to correct, to modify, or even materially add to what has been imparted to him, for his scholastic reputa- tion has been made, and a comfortable independ- ence is assured. To very many men, indeed, who go up to the Universities with the inten- tion of following teaching as a profession, a high degree is a mere investment, the one instinct in them which is not quite banausic being the conscientious thoroughness with which they impart what they have been taught. Nothing, therefore, is of more importance to education than the sound constitution of the 68 AT THE UNIVERSITIES Honour Schools of Oxford and Cambridge, and nothing could be more disastrous than the toleration in those Schools of inadequate standards, and of palpably erroneous theories of study. But to return to the Regulations. The ridicu- lous disproportion between the ground covered and the work involved in the different " special subjects" open to the option of candidates, would seem to indicate, either that the regulators are very inadequately informed on those subjects, or that divided counsels have resulted in the settle- ment of very different standards of requirement. Compare, for instance, what is involved respect- ively in such subjects as " English Literature between 1700 and 1745," and " The History of Scottish Poetry." Why, a competent know- ledge of the history of Scotch poetry in the fifteenth century alone would be more than an equivalent to the first subject. Not less absurd is the prescription of "English Litera- ture between 1745 and 1797 " as an alternative for " English Literature between 1558 and 1637." The prescription of such " special subjects " as the influence exercised on our Literature by the Literatures of Italy, Germany, and France, is one of the few steps in a wise direction discern- ible in these regulations ; but, as no student is free to take more than one of them, or required to take any of them at all, their inclusion in no way affects the constitution of the School. A 69 ENGLISH LITERATURE competent literary education is not very much furthered by a student being invited to study how our Literature has been affected by one out of the five Literatures which have influenced it. As, moreover, the integrity of a chain depends on its weakest link, so the efficiency of examinational tests, in their application to purely optional subjects, depends on that sub- ject in the list which involves least labour. A candidate who can " get a first " out of " English Literature between 1700 and 1745," or between 1745 and 1797, will be much too wise to attempt to " get a first " out of subjects which will require treble the time and labour to master. Is it likely that candidates, anxious, naturally, from less lofty motives than the love of Litera- ture for its own sake, to obtain an honour degree, will, after laboriously acquiring Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which are compulsory, voluntarily specialize in a subject requiring a knowledge of Italian and German, when it is open to them to choose, as their special subject, " Old English Language and Literature down to 1150"? The statute authorizing the foundation of this School recites that in its curriculum and exami- nations " equal weight " is, " as far as possible, to be given to Language and Literature, provided always that candidates who offer special sub- jects shall be at liberty to choose subjects con- nected either with Language or Literature, or 70 AT THE UNIVERSITIES with both." It would be interesting to know what this means. If by "equal weight" be meant equality in the proportions of what is prescribed for the study of Literature, and what is prescribed for the study of Language, the pro- vision is stultified by the very constitution of the course. To suppose that the history of English Literature, and the special study of a few par- ticular works like Shelley's Adonais, Burke's Present Discontents, and the Lyrical Ballads, is equivalent to the History of the English language, the Gospel of St. Mark in Gothic, the Beoivulf, and a volume of extracts in Anglo-Saxon, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Gawain, and the prologue and seven passus of Piers Ploughman in Middle English, is palpably absurd. If by " equal weight " be meant that an examiner is to assign equal marks to candidates who distinguish them- selves in Literature, and to candidates who dis- tinguish themselves in Language, it involves gross injustice. For while the latter have every opportunity for displaying knowledge and com- petence, the former have not. If a student has literary tastes and sympathies, if he is convers- ant with the Classics, if, attracted by what is best not merely in our own but in other modern Liter- atures, he has indulged himself in their study, if he has made himself a good critic and acquired a good style, what chance has he of doing his attainments and accomplishments justice ? But if it be meant that " equal weight " will be given, 71 ENGLISH LITERATURE not to literary merit regarded as Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold would regard it, but re- garded in relation to the standard indicated by the regulations of the School, then the philo- logists would have just reason to complain. As the constitution of this School is still open to amendment, it is devoutly to be hoped that Oxford will see its way to reconsidering a matter so seriously affecting the interests of education and culture. It is neither too late to remedy what has been done, nor to devise a remedy. Let it be remembered that there is an essential distinction between what should constitute an Honour School and what should constitute a Pass School, between what is to educate those who are to educate others, and what guarantees nothing more than a smattering. The present institution could be reformed in two ways. By reducing the philological part of its provisions to the level of the literary part, it could, with a little further simplification, be made into an excellent Pass School, which would supply a real want. By eliminating the literary part, and adding proportionately to the philological, it could be transformed into a perfectly satisfac- tory Honour School of Modern Languages. But no modification could make it into an Honour School of English Literature correspondingly adequate, for the simple reason that the study of English Literature cannot be isolated from the study of those literatures with which it is 72 AT THE UNIVERSITIES inseparably linked. The absurdity of assuming that the student of Philology could separate a single language or dialect from the group to which it belongs, that he could isolate Anglo- Saxon from Gothic, or Middle English from Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic of the Cymbry from the Celtic of the Gaels, is not greater than to assume that the study of our Literature can be severed from the study of those literatures which stand in precisely the same relation to it as one of those dialects stands to the others in the same group. If the legislators of this School decline to reform it, then it is the duty of Oxford — a duty which she owes alike to education and to her own honour — to counteract the mischief which this institution must, by degrading throughout England and the colonies the whole level of liberal instruction and study on its most import- ant side, inevitably do. To the herd of imper- fectly and erroneously disciplined teachers which this institution will turn loose on education, let her oppose, at least, a minority which shall worthily represent her. Let her establish a proper degree or diploma in Literature. There exist, as we have already said, scattered through- out the various institutions of the University, nearly all the facilities for a complete course in this subject, and nothing more is needed than to encourage and render possible their co-ordina- tion. Let it be open to a man who has obtained 73 ENGLISH LITERATURE a high class in Moderations and in the Final Classical Schools, who has availed himself of the opportunities offered for the study of Modern Languages and Literatures in the Taylorian In- stitute, and who has studied what he would at present have to study for himself, our own Literature — let it be open to him to present him- self for examination in these subjects, and to obtain, as the result of such an examination, a degree analogous to the Bachelorship of Civil Law. It would no doubt not be possible for these studies to be pursued, systematically, side by side with the work required for a high class in Moderations and Literce Humaniores. Nor is it necessary. There need be no limit assigned to the time at which a candidate would be free to qualify himself for obtaining this diploma. As a general rule it would probably be about six months, possibly a year, after the attainment of the present degree in Arts. And, considering the high prizes open to teachers in Literature, it would be well worth a student's while to spend this additional time in preparing himself for the examination. If a post-graduate scholarship, analogous to the Craven or the Derby scholar- ships, could be founded for the encouragement of a comparative study of Classical and Modern Literature, an important step would, at any rate, be taken in a right direction ; something would be done for the competent equipment of future Professors of Literature. 74 AT THE UNIVERSITIES Thus would a precedent, disastrous beyond expression to the interests of liberal instruction and culture, as well as to the reputation of the University — we mean the severance of the study of Classical Literature from that of our own — be at least deprived of its authority. Thus would the mass at any rate be leavened, and such in- stitutions in the provinces and elsewhere as have, unhke Oxford and Cambridge, had the wisdom to separate their Chairs of Language and Litera- ture, know where to go for those who should fill them ; and thus, finally, would there be some chance of the literary curriculum in Oxford ceasing to be a by-word in the Universities of the Continent and America. 75 ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES ' II. TEXT BOOKS IF any proof were needed of what has been insisted on over and over again, that, until the Universities provide adequately for the proper study of English Literature — for the study of it side by side with Classical Literature — there will be small hope of its finding competent critics and interpreters, it would be afforded by the volume before us. For this volume the delegates of the Oxford University Press are responsible ; and in allowing it their imprimatur they have been guilty of a very grave error. No such standard of editing would have been tolerated in any other subject in which they under- take to provide books. A work pertaining to Classics, to History, to Philosophy, to Science, marked by corresponding deficiencies, would have been suppressed at once, until those defi- ' Shelley's Adonais, edited with introduction and notes by William Michael Eossetti. (Oxford : at the Clarendon Press.) 76 ENGLISH LITERATURE ciencies had been supplied. To Mr. Rossetti himself we attach no blame. What he was competent to do he has, for the most part, done well and conscientiously, — conscientiously, as may be judged from the fact that, while the poem itself occupies twenty pages in large type, Mr. Rossetti's dissertations and notes occupy one hundred and twenty-eight in small type. It was, indeed, his misfortune, rather than his fault, to be entrusted with a work which required a peculiar qualification, an intimate acquaintance, that is to say, with Classical Literature. That he has no pretension to this is abundantly plain from his Introduction and from every page of his notes. When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as Adonais, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently ; it would be hardly too much, perhaps, to expect that it should be done excel- lently. Of this part of Mr. Rossetti's work we scarcely know which are the worse — his sins of commission or his sins of omission. His classical qualifications for commenting on a poem as un- intelligible, critically speaking, without constant reference to the Platonic dialogues, particularly to the Symposium and the Timceus, and to the 77 ENGLISH LITEEATURE Greek poets, as the ^neid would be without reference to the Homeric poems and the Argo- nautica of ApoUonius, appear to begin and end with some acquaintance with Mr. Lang's version of Bion and Moschus. We will give a few speci- mens. Mr. Rossetti is greatly puzzled with Shelley's allusion to Urania in stanzas 2 to 4. " Where was lone CJrania When Adonais died ? " " Most musical of mourners, weep again . Lament, anew, Urania ! " " Why out of the nine sisters," he asks, " should the Muse of Astronomy be selected ? Keats never wrote about astronomy." Perhaps, he suggests, Shelley was not thinking of the Muse Urania, " but of Aphrodite Urania." Yet, if so, why should she be called " musical " ? — a ques- tion to be asked, no doubt, as our old friend Fal- staff would say. However, after balancing the respective claims of both, he finally conies to the conclusion that the Urania of Adonais is Aphro- dite. If Mr. Rossetti had been acquainted with a work to which he never even refers, but which exercised immense influence over Shelley's poem — the Symposium of Plato — it would have saved him two pages of speculation. His ignorance of this is the more surprising as Shelley has him- self translated the dialogue. But Mr. Rossetti need not, in this case, have gone so far afield. Has he never read the prologue to the seventh 78 AT THE UNIVERSITIES book of Milton's Paradise Lost ? In his note on the lines — " The one remains, the many change and pass," it is really pitiable to find him supposing that this is an allusion to " the universal mind," and "the individuated minds which we call human beings," when any schoolboy could have told him that the allusion is, of course, a technical one to the Platonic " forms " or archetypes ; while " the power " in stanza 42, the " sustain- ing love" in stanza 54, and the " one spirit" in stanza 43, are allusions respectively to the Aphrodite Urania in the discourse of Eryxi- machus in the Symposium, and to the Divine Artificer in the Tim,cBus. And these dialogues form the proper commentary on Shelley's meta- physics in this poem. Still more extraordinary is Mr. Rossetti's note on " wisdom the mirrored shield " — " What was then Wisdom, the mirrored shield ? " (st. 27), which is as foUows : " Shelley was, I apprehend, thinking of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto (!). In that poem we read of a magic shield which casts a supernatural and intolerable splendour ... a sea monster, not a dragon, so far as I recollect, becomes one of the victims of the mirrored shield." This slovenly and per- functory mode of reference is, we may remark in passing, hardly the sort of thing to be expected 79 ENGLISH LITERATURE in works issued from University Presses. We wonder what the Universities would say to an editor of Virgil who, in commenting on some Homeric allusion in his author, contented him- self with observing that Virgil " is here thinking of the Hiad," and, " so far as I can recollect," etc. The reference is, we need hardly remark, not to any magic shield in the Orlando, but to the scutum crystallinum of Pallas Athene, as any well - informed fourth - form schoolboy would know. If Mr. Rossetti will turn to Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, chap, vii., he will find some information on this subject, which may be of use to him, should this work run into a second edition. Take, again, the note on the symbolism of the flowers and cypress cone in stanza 33 : — "His head was bound witli pansies overblown, And faded violets, white and pied and blue ; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Eound whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew.'' Here the editor's ignorance of ancient Classical Literature has led him into a whole labyrinth of blunders and misconceptions. " The ivy," he says, " indicates constancy in friendship " ! Is it credible that a Clarendon Press editor should be ignorant that ivy — doctarum, hederce prcemia frontium — is the emblem of the poet? The violet, he remarks, indicates modesty. It neither indicates, nor can possibly indicate, anything of the kind. Its traditional signification, deduced 80 AT THE UNIVERSITIES perhaps from Pliny's remark {Nat. Hist, xxl. c. 38), that it is one of the longest-lived of flowers, is fidelity. But the passage of which Shelley was thinking when he wrote this stanza — a passage to which Mr. Rossetti makes no reference at all, was Hamlet, act iv. sc. 1 : " There is pansies that's for thoughts ... I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died." So that it is quite pos- sible that the "faded violets," associated as these flowers are with the Muses and the Graces, merely symbolize the fading and drooping towards what may be further symbolized in the cypress cone, — death. We are by no means sure, however, that the cypress cone does, as Mr. Rossetti re- marks, "explain itself." Shelley, assuming he gave the image another application, was doubt- less thinking of Silvanus — "teneram ab radice ferens, Silvane, cupressum," Georg. i. 20 (see, too, Spenser's Faerie Queene, I. vi. st. 14), and raay possibly have been symbolizing his sym- pathy with the genius of the woods — have been referring to that " gazing on Nature's naked loveliness," which he describes in stanza 31. In any case, Mr. Rossetti has entirely misinter- preted the meaning of the whole passage. Wherever classical knowledge is required — as it is in almost every stanza — he either gives no note at all, or he blunders. Thus in stanza 24 he gives no note on the use of the word " secret." In stanza 28 he has evidently not the smallest E.G. 81 P ENGLISH LITERATURE notion o£ the meaning of the word " obscene " as applied to ravens. The fine adaptations from Lucretius (II. 578-580) in stanza 21, and again from II. 990-1010 in stanzas 20 and 42; the adaptation from the Agamemnon (49-51) in stanza 17 ; from the fragments of the Polyidus of Euripides in stanza 39 ; from the Biad (vi. 484) in stanza 34 ; from Theocritus, Idyll., i. 66, and Virg., Eel., x. 9-10 in stanza 2 ; and again from Theocritus, Idyll., i. 77 seqq., from which the procession of the mourners is adapted, and on which the whole architecture of the poem is modelled — all these are alike unnoticed. Nor is Mr. Rossetti more fortunate in explaining allu- sions to passages in other literatures. The adap- tation of the sublime passage in Isaiah (xiv. 9, 10), by which one of the finest parts of the poem was suggested, stanzas 45 and 46 ; the singular reminiscence in stanza 28 : — " The vultures , . . Whose wings rain contagion ; " of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, act ii. sc. 1, where he speaks of the raven which "Doth shake contagion from her sahle wings;" the obvious reminiscence of Dante, Inf., 44 seqq. in stanza 44 ; of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, v. 3, which forms the proper commentary on lines 7 and 8 of stanza 3 ; of none of these is any notice taken. On many important points of interpretation we differ toto ccelo from Mr. 82 AT THE UNIVERSITIES Rossetti. The " fading splendour," for example, in stanza 22, cannot possibly mean " fading as being overcast by sorrow and dismay" (cf. stanza 25), it simply means vanishing, receding from sight — a magnificently graphic epithet. Is Mr. Rossetti acquainted with the proleptic use of adjectives and participles ? We may add that Mr. Rossetti has not even taken the trouble to ascertain who was the writer of the famous article, of which so much is said both in the preface of the poem and in the poem itself, but " presumes," etc. Et sic omnia. And sic omnia it will inevitably continue to be, until the Universities are prepared to do their duty to education by placing the study of our national Literature on a proper footing. It is, we repeat, no reproach to Mr. Rossetti, who has distinguished himself in more import- ant studies than the production of scholastic text-books, that he should have failed in an undertaking which happened to require peculiar qualifications. Indeed, our respect for Mr. Rossetti and our sense of his useful services to Belles Lettres would have induced us to spare him the annoyance of an exposure of the deficiencies of this work, had it not illus- trated, so comprehensively and so strikingly, the disastrous effects of the severance of the study of English Literature from that of Ancient Classical Literature at our Universities. 83 ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES ' III. TEXT BOOKS MORE than a century and a half has passed since Pope thus expressed himself about philologists, — " 'Tis true on words is still our whole debate, Dispute of Me or Te, of aut or at, To sound or sink in Cano or A, To give up Cicero or C or K ; The critic eye, that microscope of wit, Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit ; How parts relate to parts or they to whole, The body's harmony, the beaming soul, Are things which Kuster, Burmann, Wasse shall see, When man's whole frame is obvious to a Flea. " We need scarcely say that we have far too much respect for Dr. Aldis Wright and for his distinguished coadjutor to apply such a descrip- tion as this to them as individuals, for no one can appreciate more heartily than we do their monu- mental contribution to the textual criticism of * Shakespeare — Select Plays. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Oxford : at the Clarendon Press, mdcccxc.) 84 ENGLISH LITERATURE Shakespeare, but we can make no such reserve in speaking of this edition of Hamlet. A more deplorable illustration, we do not say of the subjection of Literature to Philology, for that would very imperfectly represent the fact, but of the absolute substitution of Philology, and of Philology in the lowest sense of the term, for Literature it would be impossible to imagine. Had it been expressly designed to prove that its editors were wholly unconscious of the artistic, literary, and philosophical significance of Shake- speare's masterpiece, it could scarcely have taken a more appropriate form. The volume contains 117 pages of Shake- speare's text, printed in large type ; the text is preceded by a preface of twelve pages, and fol- lowed by notes occupying no less than 121 pages in very small type ; so that the work of the poet stands in pretty much the same relation to that of his commentators as Falstaff 's bread stood to his sack. In the case of a play like Hamlet, so subtle, so suggestive, so pregnant with critical and philosophical problems of all kinds, com- mentary on a scale like this might have been quite appropriate. But in this stupendous mass of exegesis and illustration there is, with the exception of one short passage, literally not a line about the play as a work of art, not a line about its structure and architecture, about its style, about its relations to aesthetic, about its metaphysic, its ethic, about the character of Hamlet, or about the character of any other 85 ENGLISH LITERATURE person who figures in the drama. The only indication that it is regarded in any other light than as affording material for philological and antiquarian discussion is a short quotation, huddled in at the conclusion of the preface, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and an intima- tion that " Hamlet's madness has formed the subject of special investigation by several writers, among others by Dr. ConoUy and Sir Edward Strachey." A more comprehensive illustration of the truth of the indictment brought against philolo- gists by Voltaire, Pope, Lessing, and Sainte- Beuve than is supplied by the notes in this volume it would be difficult to find. Dulness, of course, may be assumed, and of mere dulness we do not complain ; but a corabination of prolixity, irrelevance, and absolute incapacity to distin- guish between what to ninety-nine persons in every hundred must be purely useless and what to ninety-nine persons in every hundred is the information which they expect from a com- mentator, is intolerable. We will give a few illustrations. A plain man or a student for examination comes to these lines: — " 'Tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar ; " and, though he knows what the general sense is wishes to know exactly what Shakespeare means. He turns to the note for enlightenment, and the enlightenment he gets is this : — 86 AT THE UNIVERSITIES "Enginer. Changed in the quarto of 1676 to the more modern form of engineer. Compare Troilus and Cressida ii. 3. 8, " Then there's Achilles a rare enginer." For a cognate form mutiner see note on iii. 4. 83. So we have pioner for pioneer Othello iii. 3. 346. Hoist may be the participle either of the verb ' hoise ' or ' hoist.' In the latter case it would be the common abbreviated form for the participles of verbs ending in a dental. Petar. So spelt in the quartos, and by- all editors to Johnson, who writes ' petards.' In Cotgrave we have ' Petart : a Petard or Petarre ; an Engine (made like a bell or morter) wherewith strong gates,' etc."— And so the hungry sheep looks up and is not fed. Again, he finds — "He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice," turns to the note, and reads : — " Polacks. The quartos have ' pollax,' the two earliest folios read ' Pollax,' the third ' Polax,' the fourth ' Poleaxe.' Pope read ' Polack ' and Malone ' Polacks.' The word occurs four times in Hamlet. For ' the sledded Polacks ' Molke reads ' his leaded pole-axe.' But this would be an anti- climax, and the poet, having mentioned ' Norway ' in the first clause, would certainly have told us with whom the 'parle ' was held." The poet Young noted how " Commentators each dark passage shun. And hold their farthing candles to the sun." The Clarendon Press editors are certainly adepts in these accomplishments. Take one out of a myriad illustrations. The line in Act i. sc. 2, " The dead vast and middle of the night," is the signal for a note extending to twelve closely printed lines. " 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick 87 ENGLISH LITERATURE at heart," says Francisco. If any note were needed here, it might have been devoted to pointing out to tiros the fine subjective touch. The note is this : — '^ Bitter cold. Here bitter is used adverbially to qualify the adjective ' cold.' So we have ' daring hardy ' in Richard II. i. 3. 43. "When the combination is likely to be misunder- stood, modern editors generally put a hyphen between the two words. Sick at heart. So Macbeth v. 3. 19, ' I am sick at heart.' "We have also in Lovers Labour's Lost ii. 1. 185, ' sick at the heart,' and Romeo and Juliet iii. 3. 72, ' heart- sick groans.' " Now let us see how the poor student fares when real difficulties occur. Every reader of Shakespeare is familiar with the corrupt passage, Act iv. sc. 1 : — " The dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of worth out To his own scandal — a passage which, as all Shakespearian scholars know, has been satisfactorily emended and ex- plained. We turn to the notes for guidance, and find ourselves treated as poor Mrs. Quickly was treated by Falstaff, " fubbed o£E " — thus : — " "We leave this hopelessly corrupt passage as it stands in the two earliest quartos. The others read 'ease' for 'eale,' and modern writers have conjectured for the same word base, ill, bale, ale, evil, ail, vile, lead. For ' of a doubt' it has been proposed to substitute ' of worth out,' ' soul with doubt,' 'oft adopt,' ' oft work out,' 'of good out,' 'of worth dout,' 'often dout,' 'often doubt,' 'oft adoubt,' 'oft delase,' ' over-cloud,' ' of a pound,' and others." This, it may be added, is the sort of stuff — in- 88 AT THE UNIVEESITIES credibile dictu — that our children have to get by heart ; for this Press, be it remembered, practi- cally controls half the English Literature ex- aminations in England. As students know quite well that nine examiners out of ten will set their questions from "the Clarendon Press notes," it is with "the Clarendon Press notes" that they are obliged to cram themselves. But to continue. Even a well-read man might be excused for not knowing the exact meaning of the following expression : — " They olepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition." He turns to the notes, and having been briefly informed that clepe means " call," and addition " title," is left to flounder with what he can get out of — "Could Shakespeare have had in his mind any pun upon ' Sweyn,' which was a com- mon name of the kings of Denmark ? " Another leading characteristic of the genus philologist, we mean the preposterous importance attached by them to the smallest trifles, finds ludicrous illustration in the following note : — " My father, in his habit, as he lived ! " exclaims Hamlet to his mother. This is the signal for : — " There is supposed to be a difficulty in these words, because in the earlier scenes the Ghost is in his armour, to which the word ' habit ' is regarded as inappropriate. In the earlier form of the play, as it appears in the quarto of 1603, the Ghost enters ' in his nightgowne,' and as the words ' in the ENGLISH LITEEATURE habit as he lived ' occur in the corresponding passage of that edition, it is probable that on this occasion the Ghost appeared in the ordinary dress of the king, although this is not indi- cated in the stage directions of the other quartos or of the folios." As a possible solution of this grave difficulty, we would suggest that, as the Ghost was un- doubtedly in a very hot place, he might have found his nightgown less oppressive than his armour, and though it would certainly have been more decorous to have exchanged his night- gown for his uniform on revisiting the earth, yet, as the visit was to his wife, he thought perhaps less seriously about his apparel than our editors have done. We have nothing to warrant us in assuming that he was in his " ordinary dress." The choice must lie between the night- gown and the armour. But a truce to jesting. If any one would understand the opacity and callousness which philological study induces, we would refer them to the note on Hamlet's last sublime words, " The rest is silence " : — " The quartos have ' Which have solicited, the rest is silence.' The folios, 'Which have solicited. The rest is silence.' 0, 0, 0, 0. Dyes' If Hamlet's speech is inter- rupted by his death it V70uld be more natural than the words ' The rest is silence ' should be spoken by Horatio." We said at the beginning of this article that there was not a word of commentary on the poetical merits of the play. We beg the editors' pardon. They have in one note, and in one 90 AT THE UNIVERSITIES note only, ventured on an expression of critical opinion. We all know the lines — " There is a willow grows aslant a brook That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream," etc., etc. We transcribe the note on this passage that it may be a sign to all men of what Philo- logy is able to effect, an omen and testimony of what must inevitably be the fate of Literature if the direction and regulation of its study be entrusted to philologists : — " This speech of the Queen is certainly unworthy of its author and of the occasion. The enumeration of plants is quite as unsuitable to so tragical a scene as the description of Dover cliff in King Lear iv. 6. 11-24. Besides there was no one by to witness the death of Ophelia, else she would have been rescued." As this beggars commentary, transcription shall suffice. Now we would ask any sensible person who has followed us, we do not say in our own remarks — for they may be supposed to be the expression of biassed opinion — but in the specimens we have given of such an edition as this of Hamlet, and of such an edition as we have just reviewed of Adonais, what is likely to be the fate of English Literature, as a subject of teaching, so long as our Universities ignore their responsibilities as the centres of culture by not only countenancing, but assisting in the pro- duction and dissemination of such publications as these? How can we expect anything but 91 ENGLISH LITEEATURE anarchy wherever the subject is treated ? — there an extreme of flaccid dilettantism, here an ex- treme of philological pedantry. Conceive the tone and temper which, especially at the impres- sionable age of the students for whom the book is intended, the study of Shakespeare, under such guides as the editors of this Hamlet, would be likely to induce. Is it not monstrous that young students between the ages of about fifteen and eighteen should have such text books as these inflicted on them ? The radical fault of those who regulate educa- tion in our Universities and elsewhere, and pre- scribe our schoolbooks, is their deplorable want of judgment. They seem to be utterly incapable of distinguishing between what is proper for pure specialists and what is proper for ordinary students. There is not a page in this edition which does not proclaim aloud, that it could never have been intended for the purposes to which it has been applied, that it is the work of technical scholars, concerned only in textual and philo- logical criticism and exegesis, and appealing only to those who approach the study of Shake- speare in the same spirit and from the same point of view. Anything more sickening and depressing, anything more calculated to make the name of Shakespeare an abomination to the youth of England it would be impossible for man to devise. It is shameful to prescribe such books for study in our Schools and Educational Institutes. 92 OUR LITERARY GUIDES I. A SHOET HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ^ THIS Short History is evidently designed for the use of serious readers, for the ordinary reader who will naturally look to it for general instruction and guidance in the study of English Literature, and to whom it will serve as a book of reference ; for students in schools and colleges, to many of whom it will, in all likelihood, be prescribed as a textbook ; for teachers engaged in lecturing and in preparing pupils for examina- tion. Of all these readers there will not be one in a hundred who will not be obliged to take its statements on trust, to assume that its facts are correct, that its generalizations are sound, that its criticisms and critical theories are at any rate not absurd. It need hardly be said that, under these circumstances, a writer who had any pretension to conscientiousness would do his utmost to avoid all such errors as ordinary diligence could easily prevent, that he would guard scrupulously against random assertions and reckless misstate- ' A Short History of English Literature. By G-eorge Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 93 OUR LITERARY GUIDES ments, that he would, in other words, spare no pains to deserve the confidence placed in him by those who are not qualified to check his state- ments or question his dogmas, and who naturally suppose that the post which he occupies is a sufficient guarantee of the soundness and ac- curacy of his work. But so far from Professor Saintsbury having any sense of what is due to his position and to his readers, he has imported into his work the worst characteristics of irre- sponsible journalism : generalizations, the sole supports of which are audacious assertions, and an indifference to exactness and accuracy, as well with respect to important matters as in trifles, so scandalous as to be almost incred- ible. Sir Thomas More said of Tyndale's version of the New Testament that to seek for errors in it was to look for drops of water in the sea. What was said very unfairly of Tyndale's work may be said with literal truth of Professor Saintsbury's. The utmost extent of the space at our disposal will only suffice for a few illustrations. We will select those which appear to us most typical. In the chapter on Anglo-Saxon literature the Professor favours us with the astounding state- ment, that in Anglo-Saxon poetry "there is practically no lyric." ^ It is scarcely necessary to say that not only does Anglo-Saxon poetry ' Page 37. 94 OUR LITERARY GUIDES abound in lyrics, but tbat it is in its lyrical note that its chief power and charm consists. In the threnody of the Ruin, and the Grave, in the sentimental pathos of the Seafarer, of Dear's Complaint, and of the remarkable fragment describing the husband's pining for his wife, in the fiery passion of the three great war-songs, in the glowing subjective intensity of the Judith, in the religious ecstasy of the Holy Rood and of innumerable passages in the other poems at- tributed to Cynewulf , and of the poem attributed to Csedmon, deeper and more piercing lyric notes have never been struck. Take such a passage as the following from the Satan, typical, it may be added, of scores of others : — " thou glory of the Lord ! Guardian of Heaven's hosts, thou might of the Creator ! thou mid-circle ! thou bright day of splendour ! O thou jubilee of God ! O ye hosts of angels ! O thou highest heaven ! that I am shut from the everlasting jubilee, That I cannot reach my hands again to Heaven, . . . Nor hear with my ears ever again The clear-ringing harmony of the heavenly trumpets."' ' Ea IS, drihtenes ^rym ! ea li, dugu^a helm ! ek 1§, meotodes miht! &k la middaneard! ea la dag leohta ! e4 la dredm godes ! ea IS, engla treit ! ea IS upheofon ! e& IS, J>at io eam ealles leas ©can dreames, J>at io mid handum ne mag heofon gersecan ne mid eagum ne m6t up locian ne hftru mid earum ne sceal sefre geh§ran tore byrhtestan beman stefne. —Satan, edit. Grein, 164-172. 95 OUR LITERARY GUIDES And this is a poetry which has " practically no lyric " ! On page 2 the Professor tells us that there is no rhyme in Anglo-Saxon poetry ; on page 18 we find him giving an account of the rhyming poem in the Exeter Book. Of Mr. Saints- bury's method of dealing with particular works and particular authors, one or two examples must suffice. He tells us on page 125 that the heroines in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women are "the most hapless and blameless of Ovid's Heroides." It would be interesting to know what connexion Cleopatra, whose story comes first, has with Ovid's Heroides, or if the term "Heroides" be, as it appears to be, (for it is printed in italics) the title of Ovid's Heroic Epistles, what connexion four out of the ten have with Ovid's work. In any case the state- ment is partly erroneous and wholly misleading. In the account given of the Scotch poets, the Professor, speaking of Douglas' translation of the ^neid, says, he " does not embroider on his text." This is an excellent illustration of the confidence which may be placed in Mr. Saints- bury's assertions about works on which most of his readers must take what he says on trust. Douglas is continually " embroidering on his text," indeed, he habitually does so. We open his translation purely at random ; we find him turning ^neid II. 496-499 :— " Non sic, aggeribus ruptis cum spumeus amnis Exiit, oppositasque evicit gurgite moles," 96 OUR LITERARY GUIDES Fertur in arya furens cumulo, camposque per omnes Cum stabulis armenta trahit. Not sa fersly the foray river or flude Brekkis over the bankis on spait quhen it is wode. And with his brusch and fard of water brown The dykys and the schorys betis down, Ourspreddand oroftis and flattis wyth hys spate Our all the feyldis that they may row ane bate Quhill houssis and the flokkis flittis away, The come grangis and standard stakkys of hay." We open ^neid IX. 2 : — "Irim de coelo misit Saturnia Juno Audaoem ad Turnum. Luco turn forte parentis Pilumni Turnus sacrata valle sedebat. Ad quem sio roseo Thaumantias ore loouta est." We find it turned : — "Juno that lyst not blyn Of hir auld malyce and iniquyte, Hir madyn Iris from hevin sendys sche To the bald Turnus malapart and stout ; Quhilk for the tyme was wyth al his rout Amyd ane vale wonnder lovn and law, Sytfcand at eys within the hallowit schaw Of God Pilumnus his progenitor. Thamantis dochter knelys him before, I meyn Iris thys ilk fornamyl; maide. And with hir rosy lippis thus him said." We turn to the end of the tenth JSneid and we find him introducing six lines which have nothing to correspond with them in the original. And this is a translator who " does not em- broider on his text " ! It is perfectly plain that Professor Saintsbury has criticised and E.C. 97 G OUR LITERAEY GUIDES commented on a work which he could never have inspected. The same ignorance is dis- played in the account of Lydgate. He is pro- nounced to be a versifier rather than a poet, his verse is described as " sprawling and stagger- ing." The truth is that Lydgate's style and verse are often of exquisite beauty, that he was a poet of fine genius, that his descriptions of nature almost rival Chaucer's, that his powers of pathos are of a high order, that, at his best, he is one of the most musical of poets. We have not space to illustrate what must be obvious to any one who has not gone to encyclo- paedias and handbooks for his knowledge of this poet's writings, but who is acquainted with the original. It will not be disputed that Gray and Warton were competent judges of these matters, and their verdict must be substituted for what we have not space to prove and illustrate. "I do not pretend," Gray says, "to set Lydgate on a level with his master Chaucer, but he certainly comes the nearest to him of any contemporary writer that I am acquainted with. His choice of expression and the smooth- ness of his verse far surpass both Gower and Occleve." Of one passage in Lydgate, Gray has observed that " it has touched the very heart strings of compassion with so masterly a hand as to merit a place among the greatest poets." ^ Warton also notices his " perspicuous and ' Some Remarks on Lydgate. Gray, Aldine Ed. v. 292-821. 98 OUR LITERARY GUIDES musical numbers," and " the harmony, strength, and dignity " of his verses.^ Turn where we will we are confronted with blunders. Take the account given of Shake- speare. He began his metre, we are told, with the lumbering " fourteeners." He did, so far as is known, nothing of the kind. Again : " It is only by guesses that anything is dated before the Comedy of Errors at the extreme end of 1594." In answer to this it may be sufficient to say that Venus and Adonis was published in 1593, that the first part of Henry VI. was acted on 3rd March, 1592, that Titus An- dronicus was acted on 25th January, 1594, and that I/wcrece was entered on the Stationers' books 9th May, 1594. This is on a par with the assertion, on page 315, that Shakespeare was tra- ditionally born on 24th April ! On page 320 we are told that Measure for Measure belongs to the first group of Shakespeare's plays, to the series beginning with Love's Labours Lost and culmina- ting with the Midsummer Night's Dream. It * That Lydgate's verse should occasionally be rough and halting is partly to be attributed to the wretched state in which his text has come down to us from the copyists, and partly to the arbitrary way in which he varies the accent. His heroic couplets in the Storie of Thebes are certainly very unmusical. For the whole question of his versification see Dr. Schick, Introduction to his edition of The Temple of Glas, pp. liv.-lxiii., and Sohipper, Altenglische Metrik, 492- 500. But neither of these scholars does justice to the ex- quisite music of his verse at its best. 99 OUR LITERARY GUIDES is only fair to say that the Professor places a note of interrogation after it in a bracket, but that it should have been placed there, even tentatively, shows an ignorance of the very rudiments of Shakespearian criticism which is nothing short of astounding. Take, again, the account given of Burke. Our readers will prob- ably think us jesting when we tell them that Professor Saintsbury gravely informs us that Burke supported the American Revolution. Is the Professor unacquainted with the two finest speeches which have ever been delivered in any language since Cicero? Can he possibly be ignorant that Burke, so far from supporting that revolution, did all in his power to prevent it? The whole account of Burke, it may be added, teems with inaccuracies. The American Revolution was not brought about under a Tory administration. What brought that revolution about was Charles Townshend's tax, and that tax was imposed under a Whig adminis- tration, as every well-informed Board-school lad would know. Burke did not lose his seat at Bristol owing to his support of Roman Catholic claims. If Professor Saintsbury had turned to one of the finest of Burke's minor speeches — the speech addressed to the electors of Bristol — he would have seen that Burke's support of the Roman Catholic claims was only one, and that not the most important, of the causes which cost him his seat. Similar ignorance is displayed in 100 OUR LITERARY GUIDES the remark (p. 629) that " Burke joined, and indeed headed, the crusade against Warren Hastings, in 1788." The prosecution of Warren Hastings was undertaken on Burke's sole initia- tive, not in 1788, but in 1785. A few lines onwards we are told that the series of Burke's writings on the French Revolution " began with the Reflections in 1790, and was continued in the Letter to a Noble Lord, 1790. A Letter to a Noble Lord had nothing to do with the French Revo- lution, except collaterally as it affected Burke's public conduct, and appeared, not in 1790, but in 1795. It seems impossible to open this book anywhere without alighting on some blunder, or on some inaccuracy. Speaking (p. 277) of Willoughby's weU-known Avisa, the Professor observes that nothing is known of Willoughby or of Avisa. If the Professor had known anything about the work, he would have known that Avisa is sim- ply an anagram made up of the initial letters of Amans, vxor, inviolata semper amanda, and that nothing is known of Avisa for the simple reason that nothing is known of the site of More's Utopia. On page 360 we are told that Phineas Fletcher's Piscatory Eclogues, which are, of course, con- founded with his Sicelides, are a masque ; on page 624, but this is perhaps a printer's error, that Robertson wrote a history of Charles I. On page 482, John Pomfret, the author of one of the most popular poems of the eighteenth cen- 101 OUR LITERARY GUIDES tury, is called Thomas. On page 550, Pope's Moral Essays are described as ^n Epistle to Lord Burlington, presumably because the last of them, the fourth, is addressed to that noble- man. On page 587 we are told that Mickle died in London : he died at Forest Hill, near Oxford. On page 556 we are informed that Prior was part author of a parody of the " Hind and Panther," and that he was " imprisoned for some years." The work referred to is wrongly described, as it only contained parodies of certain passages in Dryden's poem, and he was in con- finement less than two years. On page 358, Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, is actually described as the son of jEneas. If Pro- fessor Saintsbury were as familiar as he affects to be with Geoffrey of Monmouth, with Layamon and with the early metrical romances, he would have known that Brutus is fabled to have been the son of Sylvius, the son of Ascanius, and, con- sequently, the great-grandson of ^neas. Many of the Professor's critical remarks can only be explained on the supposition that he assumes that his readers will not take the trouble to verify his references or question his dogmas. We will give one or two instances. On page 468, speaking of seventeenth-century prose, he says, with reference to Milton: " The close of the Apology itself is a very little, though only a very little, inferior to the Hydriotaphia." By the Apolqgy he can only mean the Apology for 102 OUR LITERARY GUIDES Smectymnuus, for the defence of the English people is in Latin. Now, will our readers credit that one of the flattest, clumsiest and most commonplace passages in Milton's prose writ- ings, as any one may see who turns to it, is pronounced " only a little inferior " to one of the most majestically eloquent passages in our prose literature. That our readers may know what Professor Saintsbury's notions of eloquence are, we will transcribe the passage : "Thus ye have heard, readers, how many shifts and wiles the prelates have invented to save their ill-got booty. And if it he true, as in Scripture it is foretold, that pride and covetous- ness are the sure marks of those false prophets which are to come, then boldly conclude these to be as great seducers as any of the latter times. For between this and the judgment day do not look for any arch deceivers who, in spite of reforma- tion, will use more craft or less shame to defend their love of the world and their ambition than these prelates have done. And if ye think that soundness of reason or what force of argument so ever shall bring them to an ingenuous silence, ye think that which shall never be. But if ye take that course which Erasmus was wont to say Luther took against the pope and monks : if ye denounce war against their riches and their bellies, ye shall soon discern that turban of pride which they wear upon their heads to be no helmet of salvation, but the mere metal and homwork of papal juris- diction ; and that they have also this gift, like a certain kind of some that are possessed, to have their voice in their bellies, which, being well drained and taken down, their great oracle, which is only there, will soon be dumb, and the divine right of episcopacy forthwith expiring will put us no more to trouble with tedious antiquities and disputes." And this is "a very little, only a very little, inferior," to the " Hydriotaphia " ! 103 OUR LITERARY GUIDES On page 652, Swift's style, that perfection of simple, unadorned sermo pedestris — is described as marked by " volcanic magnificence." On page 300 Hooker is described as "having an unnecessary fear of vivid and vernacular ex- pression." Vivid and vernacular expression is, next to its stateliness, the distinguishing cha- racteristic of Hooker's style. It would be in- teresting to know what is meant by the re- mark on page 445 that Barrow's style is "less severe than South's." Another example of the same thing is the assertion on page 517 that Joseph Glanville is one of "the chief ex- ponents of the gorgeous style in the seven- teenth century." Very 'gorgeous' the style of the Vanity of Dogmatizing, of its later edition the Scepsis Scientifica, of the Sadducis- mus Triumphatus, of the Lux Orientalis, and of the Essays ! Indeed, the Professor's critical dicta are as amazing as his facts. We have only space for one or two samples. Cowley's Anacreontics are "not very far below Milton "(!) Dr. Donne was " the most gifted man of letters next to Shake- speare." Where Bacon, where Ben Jonson, where Milton are to stand is not indicated. Akenside's stilted and frigid Odes " fall not so far short of Collins." We wonder what Mr. Saintsbury's criterion of poetry can be. But we forget, with that criterion he has furnished us. On page 732, speaking of "a story about a 104 OUR LITERARY GUIDES hearer who knew no English, but knew Tenny- son to be a poet by the hearing," he adds that " the story is probable and valuable, or rather invaluable, for it points to the best if not the only criterion of poetry." And this is a critic ! We would exhort the Professor to ponder well Pope's lines : "But most by numbers judge a poet's song, In the bright muse, tbo' thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tvineful fools admire. Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear." On page 734 we are told Browning's James Lee — the Professor probably means James Lee's Wife — is amongst " the greatest poems of the century." On Wordsworth's line, judged not in relation to its context, but as a single verse — " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting " — we have the following as commentary: "Even Shakespeare, even Shelley have little more of the echoing detonation, the auroral light of true poetry"; very " echoing," very "detonating" — the rhythm of " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." Mr. Saintsbury's notions of what constitutes detonation and auroral light in poetry appear to resemble his notions of what constitutes eloquence in prose. Nothing, we may add in passing, is more amusing in this volume than Mr. Saintsbury's cool assumption of equality as a critical authority with such a critic as 105 OUR LITERARY GUIDES Matthew Arnold, whom he sometimes patronises, sometimes corrects, and sometiraes assails. The Professor does not show to advantage on these occasions, and he leaves us with the impression that if "Mr. Arnold's criticism is piecemeal, arbitrary, fantastic, and insane," the criticism which appears, where it is not mere nonsense, to take its touchstones, its standards, and its canons from those of the average Philistine is, after all, a very poor substitute. But enough of Mr. Saintsbury's " criticism," which is, almost uniformly, as absurd in what it praises as in what it censures. The style, or, to borrow an expression from Swift, what the poverty of our language com- pels us to call the style, in which this book is written, is on a par with its criticism. We will give a few examples. "It is a proof of the greatness of Dryden that he knew Milton for a poet ; it is a proof of the smallness (and mighty as he was on some sides, on others he was very small) of Milton that (if he really did so) he denied poetry to Dryden." ^ " What the Voyage and Travaile really is, is this — it is, so far as we know, and even beyond our know- ledge in all probability and likelihood, the first considerable example of prose in English deal- ing neither with the beaten track of theology and philosophy, nor with the, even in the Middle Ages, restricted field of history and » Page 474. 106 OUR LITERARY GUIDES home topography, but expatiating freely on unguarded plains and on untrodden hiUs, some- times dropping into actual prose romance and always treating its subject as the poets had treated theirs in Brut and Mort d Arthur, in Troy -hook and Alexandreid, as a mere canvas on which to embroider flowers of fancy." ^ Again, "With Anglo-Saxon history he deals slightly, and despite his ardent English patriot- ism — his book opens sso-th. a vigorous panegyric of England, the first of a series extending to the present day (from which an anthology De Laudibus Anglice might be made) — he deals very harshly with Harold Godwinson." ^ " He had a fit of stiff Odes in the Gray and Collins manner." " The Hind and Panther (the greatest poem ever written in the teeth of its subject "). " His voluminous Latin works have been tackled by a special Wyclif Society." These are a few of the gems in which every chapter abounds. Of Professor Saintsbury's indifference to ex- actness and accuracy in details and facts we need go no further for illustrations than to his dates. Such things cannot be regarded as trifles in a book designed to be a book of reference. We will give a few instances. We are informed on page 238 that Ascham's Schoolmaster was pubhshed in 1568 ; it was published, as its title- page shows, in 1570. Hume's Dissertations were » Page 150. * Page 63. 107 OUR LITERARY GUIDES first published, not in 1762, but in 1757. Bale's flight to Germany was not in 1547, when such a step would have been unnecessary, but in 1540. Pecock was, we are told, translated to Chichester in 1550, exactly ninety years after his death! As if to perplex the readers of this book, two series of dates are given ; we have the dates in the narrative and the dates in the index, and no attempt is made to reconcile the discrepancies. Accordingly we find in the narrative that Caxton was probably born in 1415 — in the index that he was born in 1422 ; in the narrative that Latimer, Fisher, Gascoign and Atterbury were born respectively in 1489, in 1465, about 1537 and in 1672 — in the index that they were born respectively in 1485, 1459, 1525 and 1662 ; in the narrative Gay was born in 1688 — in the index he was born in 1685. In the narrative Collins dies in 1756, and Mrs. Browning is born in 1806 — in the index Collins dies in 1759, and Mrs. Browning is born in 1809. The narrative tells us that Aubrey was born in 1626, and John Dyer circa 1688 — in the index that Aubrey was born in 1624 and Dyer circa 1700. In the index Mark Pattison dies in 1884 — in the narrative he dies in 1889. In Professor Saintsbury's eyes such indifference to accuracy may be venial : in our opinion it is nothing less than scandalous. It is assuredly most unfair to those who will naturally expect to find in a book of reference trustworthy information. 108 OUR LITERARY GUIDES We must now conclude, though we have very far from exhausted the list of errors and mis- statements, of absurdities in criticism and absurdities in theory, which we have noted. Bacon has obser 7ed that the best part of beauty is that which a picture cannot express. It may be said, with equal truth, of a bad book, that what is worst in it is precisely that which it is most difficult to submit to tangible tests. In other words, it lies not so much in its errors and inaccuracies, which, after all, may be mere trifles and excrescences, but it lies in its tone and colour, its flavour, its accent. Professor Saintsbury appears to be constitutionally in- capable of distinguishing vulgarity and coarse- ness from liveliness and vigour. So far from having any pretension to the finer qualities of the critic, he seems to take a boisterous pride in exhibiting his grossness. If our review of this book shall seem unduly harsh, we are sorry, but a more exasperating writer than Professor Saintsbury, with his in- difference to all that should be dear to a scholar, the mingled coarseness, triviality and dogmatism of his tone, the audacious nonsense of his gen- eralisations, and the offensive vulgarity of his diction and style — a very well of English defiled — we have never had the misfortune to meet with. Turn where we will in this work, to the opinions expressed in it, to the sentiments, to the verdicts, to the style, the note is the same, — the note of the Das Gemeine. 109 OUR LITERARY GUIDES II. A SHORT HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE! THE author of this work has plainly not pondered the advice of Horace, " Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, sequam viribus." His ambitious purpose is "to give the reader, whether familiar with books or not, a feeling of the evolution of English Literature in the primary sense of the term," and he adds that "to do this without relation to particular authors and par- ticular works seems to me impossible." This may be conceded ; for, a feeling of the evolution of English or of any other literature, without reference to particular authors and particular books, would be analogous to the capacity for feeling without anything to feel. But, unfor- tunately, those of Mr. Gosse's readers who wish to have the feeling to which he refers will merely find the conditions without which, as he so justly observes, the said feeling is impossible. ' A Short History of Modern English Literature. By 38. 110 Edmund Gosse, London, 1898. OUR LITERARY GUIDES In other words, references, in the form of loose and desultory gossip, to particular authors and particular works chronologically arranged, are all that represent the " evolution " of which he is so anxious " to give a feeling." Described simply, the work is an ordinary manual of English Literature in which, with Mr. Humphry Ward's English, Poets, Sir Henry Craik's English Prose Writers, Chambers' Gyclo- pcedia of English Literature, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the like before him, the writer tells again the not unfamiliar story of the course of our Literature from Chaucer to the present time. But Mr. Gosse is no mere compiler, and brings to his task certain qualifications of his own, a vague and inac- curate but extensive knowledge of our seven- teenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Belles Lettres ; and here, as a rule, he can acquit him- self creditably. Though far from a sound, he is a sympathetic critic ; he has an agreeable but somewhat affected style, and can gossip pleasantly and plausibly about subjects which are within the range indicated. But at this point, as is painfully apparent, his qualifications for being an historian and critic of English Literature end. The moment he steps out of this area he is at the mercy of his handbooks ; so completely at their mercy that he does not even know how to use them. And it is here that Mr. Gosse becomes so irritating, partly be- lli OUE LITERARY GUIDES cause of the sheer audacity with which mere inferences are substituted for facts and simple assumptions for deduced generalizations, and partly because of the habitual employment of phraseology so vague and indeterminate that it is difficult to submit what it conveys to posi- tive test. These are serious charges to bring against any writer ; and if they cannot be abun- dantly substantiated, a still more serious charge may justly be urged against the accuser. To turn to the work. On page 85 Mr. Gosse favours us with the following account of the Faerie Queene : " A certain grandeur which sus- tains the three great Cantos of Truth, Temper- ance, and Chastity fades away as we proceed. . . . The structure of it is loose and incoher- ent when we conapare it with the epic grandeur of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso." It would be difficult to match this ; every word which is not a blunder is an absurdity. Where are " the three great Cantos " ? Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the poem is divided into books, each book containing twelve Cantos? Assuming, however, that he has confounded books with Cantos, where is the great book dealing with ' Truth ' ? As he places it before 'Temperance,' we presume that he means the first book and that he has confounded ' Truth ' with ' Holiness.' This is pretty well, to begin with. Where, we next ask in amazement, is the 'grandeur' which sustains the prolix farrago of the third book, and which 'fades 112 OUR LITERARY GUIDES away' as we proceed to the only book which ahnost rivals the first and second, the fifth, and the sublimest portion of the whole work, the superb Cantos which represent all that remains of the seventh? What, we gasp, is the meaning of the * epic grandeur ' of Ariosto ? and "the loose and incoherent structure" of the Faerie Queene when compared with that of the Orlando Furioso? Could any poem be more loose and incoherent in structure than the Orlando, or any term be less appropriate to its tone and style than ' grandeur ' ? On page 80 he actually tells us that Fox's well-known Book of Martyrs was written in Latin and trans- lated by John Day, and that it is John Day's translation of the Latin original which repre- sents that work, confounding Fox's Commen- tarii Rerum in Ecclesid gestarum, etc., printed at Ba^ with the Acts and Monuments of the Church, and making John Day, the publisher of it, the translator of it into English ! And this is his account of one of the most celebrated works in our language. Of Swift's Sentiments of a Church of England Man, we have the following account : " That such a tract as the Sentiments of a Church of England Man, with its gusts of irony, its white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards Junius is obvious." This is an excellent example of the confidence which may be placed in Mr. Gosse's assertions. Of this pamphlet, it may be sufficient to say that there B.C. 113 H OUR LITERARY GUmES is not a single touch of irony or satire in it ; that it stands almost alone among Swift's tracts for its perfectly temperate and logical tone ; it is a calm appeal to pure reason. There is the same audacity of assertion in classing Feltham's Resolves with Hall's and Overbury's Character Sketches, and Earle's Microcostnogonie as "a typical example " of " a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture, partly ethical and partly dramatic." In 1625, we are told that Bacon completed the Sylva Sylvarum. If Mr. Gosse knew anything of Bacon's philosophical writings, he would have known that the Sylva Sylvarum never was and never could have been completed, for it was in itself a fragment — a mere collection of materials to be incorporated in the Phcenomena Universi, a work which was to have been six times larger than Pliny's Natural History. In giving an account of Tillotson, he speaks of " the serene and insinuating periods " of the ele- gant latitudinarian who "was assiduous in say- ing what he had to say in the most graceful and intelligible manner possible." A more perfect description of the very opposite of Tillotson's Btyle could hardly be given. Those who are acquainted with Fuller's writings will be equally surprised to find him classed with Jeremy Taylor and Henry More, and to learn that his style is 'florid and involved,' distinguished by its 'long-windedness' and 'exuberance.' Has Mr. Gosse no apprehension of his readers turning to 114 OUR LITERARY GUIDES the originals and testing his statements? We have another of these bold assertions in the account of Lydgate, derived, we suspect, from a hasty generalization from a remark made about him in Mr. Ward's British Poets. "Lyd- gate," says Mr. Gosse, " had a most defective ear ; his verses are not to be scanned. His ear was bad and tuneless." Any one who has read Lydgate knows that, if we except his heroic couplets, a more musical poet is not to be found in the fifteenth century, or, indeed, in our language ; the softness and smoothness of his verse, wherever he writes in stanzas, as he generally does, is indeed his chief charac- teristic. These remarks are minor illustra- tions of an accomplishment in which Mr. Gosse has no rival. The Euphuists of the sixteenth century drew, for purposes of simile and illustration, on a fabulous natural history which assumed the ex- istence of certain animals, herbs, and minerals, and of certain properties and qualities possessed by them. This gave great point and pictur- esqueness to their style, and though it was cer- tainly misleading and occasionally perplexing to those who went to them for natural history, it had a most charming and imposing effect. Mr. Gosse seems to have imported a similar fiction into criticism. Of this we have a most amusing illustration on page 155. Speaking 115 OUR LITERARY GUIDES of Herrick Mr. Gosse remarks, "In the midst of these extravagances, like Meleager winding his pure white violets" — the Italics are ours — "into the gaudy garland of late Chreek JEu- phuisni, we find Robert Herrick." Meleager's Anthology is not extant, but the dedication is, and from that dedication we know exactly from what poets it was compiled. It ranged from about B.C. 700 till towards the close of the Alexandrian Age, for, with the exception of Antipater of Sidon, it is very doubtful whether he inserted any epigrams by his con- temporaries, but he admitted a hundred and thirty-one of his own. In other words his collection comprised epigrams composed by the masters preceding the Alexandrian Age from Archilochus downwards, and by those who, during that age and afterwards, cultivated with scrupulous care the simplicity and purity of the early models. Indeed, the poets re- presented in his Anthology are, with one ex- ception, the artists of Greek epigram in its purest, simplest, and chastest form. That one exception is himself. In him are first ap- parent the dulcia vitia of the Decadence ; he is full of dainty subtleties, he is almost more Oriental than Greek, his style is luscious, ela- borate and florid. Such, then, was the com- position of "the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism," and such the nature of the "pure 116 OUE LITERAEY GUIDES white violets" wound into it by Meleager. It is amusing to trace Mr. Gosse's rhodomontade to its source. In the well-known dedication to which we have referred, Meleager prettily compares the various poets, from whose works he selects, to flowers, speaking modestly of his own contributions as " early white violets." To critics like Mr. Gosse the rest is easy. Meleager, he no doubt argued, was an ex- cellent poet ; he belonged to a late age : ' Eu- phuism' — a delightfully vague term, is likely to characterise a late age ; a poet who com- pares his verses to white violets had evidently a taste for simplicity, and presumably, there- fore, was no Euphuist ; a gaudy garland is an excellent set off for pure white violets. And so, to the great perplexity of scholars, but to the great satisfaction of those who enjoy a pretty sentence, Meleager will continue "to wind his pure white violets into the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism." We have a similar illustration of the same thing in Mr. Gosse's account of Shaftesbury. We are told that he "was perhaps the great- est literary force between Dryden and Swift " ; that " he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke down the barrier which ex- cluded England from taking her proper place in the civiUzation of literary Europe " ; that " he set an example for the kind of prose which was 117 OUR LITERARY GUIDES to mark the central years of the century" ; that "his style glitters and rings, and . . . yet so curious that one marvels that it should have fallen completely into neglect" ; that "he was the first Englishman who developed theories of formal virtue, who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good " ; that the modern attitude of mind seems to meet us first in the graceful cosmo- politan writings of Shaftesbury ; that " without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater." Such amazing nonsense almost confounds refutation by its sheer ab- surdity. With regard to the first statement, it may be sufficient to say that between the period of Dryden's literary activity and the publi- cation of Swift's Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub were flourishing Hobbes, Izaak Wal- ton, Bunyan, Temple, and Locke ; that between the publication of the Tale .of a Tub and of Shaftesbury's collected writings were flourishing Addison, Steele, De Foe, Arbuthnot, Berkeley. With regard to the second statement, it would be interesting to know how a writer who had been preceded by Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, could be described as a writer who had been the first " to break down the barrier which excluded England from taking her proper place in the civilization of literary Europe." The truth is, that Shaftesbury exercised no influence at all 118 OUR LITERARY GUIDES on Continental Literature until long after our Literature had generally become influential in France. Equally absurd and baseless is the remark that he "set an example of the kind of prose that was to mark the central years of the century." Whose prose was affected by him? Bolingbroke's? or Fielding's? or Richard- son's ? or Middleton's ? or Johnson's ? or Gold- smith's ? or Hume's ? or Hawkesworth's ? or Sterne's? or Smollett's? or Chesterfield's? that of the writers in the Monthly Review^ or in the Adventurer"? or in the World? or in the Connois- seur? To say of Shaftesbury's style that "it gut- ters and rings," is to say what betrays utter ignorance of its characteristics. As a rule, it is diffuse, involved, and cumbrous, affected, but with an affectation which sedulously aims at the very opposite effects of " glittering and ringing." When he is eloquent, as in the Moralists, he imi- tates the style of Plato ; his vice is florid verbos- ity ; it may be doubted whether a single sentence could be found to which Mr. Gosse's description would be applicable. If, it may be added, his style had " fallen completely into neglect," it is some- what surprising that "he should set an example for the kind of prose which was to mark the cen- tral years of the century." When we are told that he was " the first Englishman who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good," we ask in amazement whether Mr. Gosse has ever inspected the Hymns of Spenser and 119 OUE LITEEARY GUIDES the writings of the Cambridge Platonists ; and when he tells us that without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater, we would suggest to him that both Ruskin and Pater w^ere perhaps not ignorant of the Platonic Dialogues. In the account given of Spenser, a poem is attributed to him which he never wrote. "In one of his early pieces, The Oak and The Briar, went far," etc., the oak and the briar is simply an episode in the second eclogue of the Shepherd's Calendar. Mr. Gosse, probably finding it quoted in some book of selec- tions, has jumped to the conclusion that it is a separate poem. Of Mr. Gosse's qualifications for dealing with Spenser, we have, by the way, an excellent example in the following remark : "Spenser, although he boasted of his classical acquirements, was singularly little affected by Greek or even Latin ideas." Spenser's Hymns in honour of Love and in Honour of Beauty are simply saturated with Platonism, being indeed directly derived from the Phcedrus and the Symposium, numberless passages from which are interwoven with the poems. The whole scheme of the Faerie Queene was suggested by, and based on, Aristotle's Ethics with elaborate particularity, Arthur, in his relation to the several knights, corresponding to the virtue lii€yaXo'\}rvx''a in its relation to the other virtues. The conclusion of the tenth canto of the first book is simply an allegorical presentation of the 120 OUR LITERARY GUIDES relation of the ^St'o? ^ewpijTtKo? to practical life. The " Castle of Medina " in the second book is a minutely technical exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, modified by the Platonic theory of morals : the three mothers being the Xo7K7TtK^, the iTTidvfirjTiKij, and dvfirjTiKTj, the three daughters, Elissa, Perissa, and Medina, being respectively the Aristotelian e\'ket,y{n<;, the xnrep^oXrj, and the /j.ea-orr]';. In fact, the whole passage is simply an allegory of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. The whole of the ninth canto of the second book is founded on the famous passage in the Timmus describing the anatomy of man. In truth the poem teems with references to Plato and Aristotle, and with passages imitated from the Greek poets, as every scholar knows. And this is a poet " singularly little affected by Greek ideas ! " The same astonishing ignorance is displayed in a remark about Milton. We are told that in his youth he was "slightly subjected to in- fluence from Spenser." If Mr. Gosse had any adequate acquaintance with Milton and Spenser, he would have known that Spenser was to Milton almost what Homer was to Virgil, that Spenser's influence simply pervades his poems, not his youthful poems only, but Paradise Lost and even Paradise Regained. On page 194 we find this sentence : " From 1660 onwards . . . what France originally, and then England, chose was the imitatio veterum, the Literature 121 OUR LITERARY GUIDES in prose and verse which seemed most closely to copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace were taken, not merely as patterns, but as arbiters." It would be very interesting to know what English author took Aristotle as a pattern for style. Is Mr. Gosse acquainted with the characteristics of Aristotle's style? Should he ever become so, he will probably have some sense of the immeasurable absurdity of asserting that our prose writers from 1660 onwards took that style for their model. On a par with this is the assertion that up to 1605 Bacon had mainly issued his works in " Ciceronian Latin." Is Mr. Gosse aware of the meaning of " Ciceronian Latin " ? Very " Ciceronian " indeed is Bacon's Latinity, and particularly that of the Medita- tiones Sacrce, the only work published in Latin by Bacon up to 1605 ! It is scarcely necessary to say, in passing, that such works as Bacon had published up to 1605 were, with the one exception referred to, all in English. No- thing, it may be added, is so annoying in this book as its slushy dilettantism. Mr. Gosse appears to be incapable of accuracy and pre- cision. Thus he tells us that Chaucer's expe- dition to Italy in 1372 was "the first of several Italian expeditions." Chaucer, so far as is known, visited Italy, after this, exactly once. Again, he tells us that the Complaint of Mars and the Parliament of Fowls are interesting as showing that Chaucer had completely abandoned 122 OUR LITERARY GUIDES his imitation of French models. Chaucer wrote several poems in the pure French style, and based on French models, after the date of these poems. Such would be the Rondel Merciless Beauty suggested by Williamme d' Amiens, the Compleynt of Venus, partly adapted and partly translated from three Ballades by Sir Otes de Graunson, and the Compleynt to his Empty Purse, modelled on a Ballade by Eustache Des- champs, while French influence continued to modify his work throughout. On page 238 we are told that Thomson revived the Spenserian stanza ; it had been revived by Pope, Prior, Shenstone, and Akenside. On page 151 we are informed that the first instalment of Clar- endon's History remained unprinted till 1752, and the rest of it till 1759. If Mr. Gosse knew anything about one of the most remarkable controversies of the eighteenth century, he would have known that the greater part of it was printed and published between 1702 and 1704, and frequently reprinted between 1704 and 1731. There is not a chapter in the book which does not teem with errors. Trissino's Sofonisba was not the only work in which blank verse had attained any prominence in Italy about 1515 ; it had been employed in works equally prominent, by Rucellai in his Rosmunda, and in his Oreste, as well as in his didactic poem L'Api, and by Alamanni in his Antigone, all 123 OUR LITERARY GUIDES of whicli were composed within a few years of that date. On page 120 we are told that Davies was the first to employ, on a long flight, the heroic quatrain ; it had been employed by Spenser in a poem extending to nearly a thousand lines. Nor was Surrey's essay in terza rima " the earliest in the language." Chaucer made the same experiment, though a little irregularly, in the Compleynt to his Lady. We are told on page 79 that Gascoigne was " the first translator of Greek tragedy." Gas- coigne never translated a line from the Greek. His Jocasta, to which presumably the reference is made, is simply an adaptation of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta. On page 25 we are informed that " Gower's French verse has mainly dis- appeared." Gower is not known to have writ- ten anything in French except the Ballades and the Speculum Meditantis, both of which are extant, as it is inexcusable in any his- torian of English Literature not to know. The account given on page 25 of the Confessio Amantis shows that Mr. Gosse is very im- perfectly acquainted with what he so fluently criticises, or he would have been aware that the seventh book is purely episodical and has nothing whatever to do with " The lover's symptoms and experience." In the account of Pope we are informed that "Boileau dis- couraged love poetry and Pope did not seriously 124 OUR LITERARY GUIDES attempt it." Pope is the author of the most famous love poem in the eighteenth century, Eloisa to Abelard, to say nothing of the Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady, of the beautiful hymn to Love in the second chorus in the tragedy of Brutus, and the exquisite fragment supposed to have been addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. "The satires of Pope," he continues, " would not have been written but for those of his French predecessor," Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the satires of Pope are modelled on the Satires and Epistles of Horace, that they owe absolutely nothing to Boileau, not even the hint for applying Roman satire to modern times, as he had precedents in his own countrymen Dryden and Rochester ? Mr. Gosse's criticism is often very amus- ing, as here, speaking of Gibbon : " Perhaps he leaned on the strength of his style too much, and sacrificed the abstract to the concrete." Of all historians who have ever lived, Gibbon is the most "abstract" and has most sacrificed the " concrete " to the " abstract," as every student of history knows. On a par with this is the prodigious statement (p. 291) that there is " an absence of emotional imagination " in Burke ! That excellent man, Mr. Pecksniff, was, we are told, in the habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a fine sound and rounding a sentence well, without much care for its meaning ; " and this," says his biographer 125 OUR LITERARY GUIDES "he did so boldly and in such an imposing manner that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people and make them gasp again." This is precisely Mr. Gosse's method. About the propriety of his epithets and statements, so long as they sound well, he never troubles him- self ; sometimes they are so vague as to mean anything, as often they have no meaning at all, as here : " His [that is Shelley's] style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis built about 1760, from which it is every moment springing and sparkling, like a fountain, in columns of ebullient lyricism." Could pure nonsense go further? We have another illustration of the same audacity of absurd assertion on page 260. We are there informed — Mr. Gosse is speaking of our prose literature about the centre of the eighteenth century — that " Philosophy by this time had become detached from belles lettres ; it was now quite indifferent to those who prac- tised it, whether their sentences were harmonious or no. . . . Philosophy in fact quitted litera- ture." If there was any period in our prose literature when philosophy was in the closest alliance with belles lettres, and was most studious of the graces of style, it was between about 1750 and 1771. In those years appeared Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, one of the raost eloquent philosophical treatises ever written, Burke's Treatise on the Sublime and 126 OUR LITERARY GUIDES Beautiful, Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, Tucker's Light of Nature Pursued, Beattie's Essay on Truth, to say nothing of Hume's Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, his Political Discourses, and his Natural History of Religion, all of them works pre-eminently distinguished by the graces of style, while so far from philosophy quitting belles lettres, it was during these years that the foundations of philosophical criticism were laid by Burke, Harris, Hurd, Kames, and others. Mr. Gosse appears to have forgotten that he had himself told us (p. 205) that Shaftesbury's style set the example of the prose which was to mark the central years of the century ! Thus again Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is "an entertaining neurotic compendium " ; Bacon's Essays are "often mere notations . . . enlarged in m.any cases merely to receive the impressions of a Machiavellian ingenuity." Shelley's Trium.ph of Life is " a noble but vague gnomic poem, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are summed up and sometimes excelled." Keats' " great odes are Titanic and Tifcianic." On page 284 we are in- formed that for fifteen years after the close of 1800 "poetry may be said to have been stationary in England." When we remember that within these years appeared the best of Wordsworth's poems, the best of Coleridge's, the best of Scott's, the best of Crabbe's, the first two cantos of Childe Harold, the best of Campbell's, the best 127 OUR LITERARY GUIDES of Moore's, and of Southey's — we wonder what can be meant, till we read on to find that it waa "on the contrary extremely active." But "its activity took the form of the gradual acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expulsion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of examples of what had once for all been supremely accomplished in the hollows of the Quantocks." In other words, its activity took the form of its activity, and its activity led to its becoming stationary. Mr. Gosse is sometimes solemnly oracular, as here : " It is a sentimental error to suppose that the winds of God blow only through the green tree ; it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable to their passage." It is not sometimes, we submit, but always that the dry tree will be most pro- pitious to their passage. But we like Mr. Gosse best when he is eloquent, as here : " In the chapel of Milton's brain, entirely devoted though it was to a Biblical form of worship, there were flutes and trumpets to accompany one vast commanding organ." No wonder poor Milton suffered, as we know he did suffer, from insomnia ! The statement that " so miserable is the poverty of the first half of the seventeenth century, when we have mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose writer to be named," is bad enough. To sum up Pecock's work with the remark, " the matter is paradoxi- 128 OUR LITERARY GUIDES cal and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in which he secures the sympathy neither of the new thought nor the old," is to demon- strate that Mr. Gosse knows nothing whatever ahout it. The Repressor is in many important respects one of the most remarkable Ts^orks in our early prose Literature. It woiild be interesting to know what is the meaning of the following : "The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone in a sort of underwood of Theophrastian character sketches." Does Mr. Gosse suppose that English prose Literature in and about 1637 is represented by Hall's Characters of Vices and Virtues, by Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters, and by Earle's Microcosmographie, which ap- peared respectively, not in and about 1637, but in 1608, in 1614, and in 1628 ? If this was the underwood in which Ohillingworth's work stood, it stood also in a dense forest represented by some of the most celebrated prose writings of the seventeenth century, such as the greater part of the writings of Bacon and of Raleigh, the Anatomy of Melancholy, Selden's Titles of Honour and Mare Clausum, Lord Herbert of Cherbury's De Veritate, Feltham's Resolves, the best of Hall's writings, Purchas' Pilgrims, Bar- clay's Argenis, the Histories of Speed, Stowe, Hayward, and Raleigh, Heylin's Microcosmus, Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, and the famous sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, all of which appeared between 1608 and 1637. These are the sort of E.G. 129 I OUR LITERARY GUIDES remarks in which Mr. Gosse habitually indulges. We have another example in the following : " Shelley's attitude to style is in the main re- trograde," a generalization based on the fact that he was no admirer of " the arabesque of the cockney school." But were Shelley's chief contemporaries admirers of the arabesque of the cockney school, or were they affected by it ? Was Wordsworth, was Coleridge, or Southey, or Byron, or Orabbe, or Campbell, or Landor ? — a question which Mr. Gosse probably never stopped to ask himself. On a par with this is the absurd assertion that " English poetry was born again during the autumn months of 1797." The appearance of the Lyrical Ballads did not make, but mark, an era in our poetry. The revolution of which they were the expression had been maturing, as surely but distinctly as the social and political revolution marked by the assembly of the States-General ten years before. There was hardly a note struck in the Lyrical Ballads which had not been struck in our poetry between 1740 and the date of their appearance. To call this compilation a History of Modern English Literature is ludicrous. Mr. Gosse has no conception even of the eras into which our Literature naturally falls, or of the movements which in each of those eras defined themselves. Nothing could be more misleading and inadequate than the accounts given of the historians, theo- 130 OUR LITERARY GUIDES logians, philosophers, and critics, many of whom — nay, whole schools of whom — are not noticed at all. Sidney's epoch-marking little treatise is dismissed in four unmeaning lines as "an urbane and eloquent essay, which labours under but one disadvantage, namely, that when it was com- posed in 1581 there was scarcely any poesy in England to be defended. This was posthu- mously printed in 1595." Ben Jonson's not less remarkable Discoveries are not even mentioned. How writers like Bacon, Hooker, Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley fare we have not space to illus- trate. Mr. Gosse, indeed, judging by his excur- sions into the realms of theology and philo- sophy, has certainly been wise to assign more space to The Flower and the Leaf than is as- signed to Hobbes, Barrow, Butler, and Paley put together. We have by no means exhausted the list of blunders and absurdities to be found in this book ; but we have, we fear, exhausted the patience of our readers, and we must bring our examination of it to a close. The melancholy thing about all this is the perfect impunity with which such works as these can be given to the public. We have not the sraallest doubt that this book has been extolled to the skies in reviews which have not detected a single error in it, and which have accepted its generalizations and its criticisms with unquestioning credulity ; and we have as little doubt that those scholars who have dis- 131 OUR LITERARY GUIDES cerned its defects and absurdities have chosen, from motives possibly of kindness, possibly of prudence, and possibly in mere contempt, to maintain silence about them. Had it appeared twenty years ago, it would instantly have been exposed and exploded, indeed no writer would have dared to insult serious readers by such a publication. What every reader has a right to demand from those who take upon themselves to instruct him are sincerity, industry, and com- petence ; and what no critic has a right to con- done is ostentatious indifference on the part of an author to the responsibilities incurred by him in undertaking to teach the public. The sooner Mr. Gosse, and writers like Mr. Gosse, come to understand that, however in- geniously expressed, reckless generalizations, random assertions and the specious semblance of knowledge, erudition, and authority may pass current for a time, but are certain at last to be detected and exposed, the better for them- selves and the better for their readers. If, too, they wish justice to be done to the accomplish- ments which they really possess, they will do well to remember what is implied in the proverb Ne sutor ultra crepidam, and what the Germans mean by Vbrmbssbnhbit. 132 LOa-EOLLING AND EDUCATION WE see no objection to Mutual Admiration Societies ; they are institutions which afford much pleasure, and can, as a rule, do little harm. If vanity be a foible, it is a foible well worth cherishing, and will be treated tenderly even by a philosopher. For, of all the illusions which give a zest to life, the illusions created by this flattering passion are the most delightful and inspiring. They are so easily evoked ; they respond with such impartial ob- sequiousness to the call of the humblest magi- cian. He has but to speak the w^ord — and they are made ; to command — and they are created. A becomes what B and pronounce him to be, and what A and have done for B, that will B and A do in turn for 0. It is a deli- cious occupation, no doubt, a feast for each, in which no crude surfeit reigns, where, in Bacon's phrase, satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable ; it is like the herbage in the Paradise of the Spanish poet, " quanto mas se 133 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION goza mas renace," — the more we enjoy it the more it grows. It is an old game — " Vetus fabula per novos histriones " : — " 'Twas, ' Sir, your law,' and ' Sir, your eloquence,' ' Tours Cowper's manner and yours Talbot's sense ' ; Thus we dispose of all poetic merit : Yours Milton's genius and mine Homer's spirit. "Walk with respect behind, while we at ease Weave laurel crowns and take what name we please. ' My dear Tibullus ! ' if that will not do. Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you." And there is this advantage. If a sufficient number of magicians can, or will, combine, these illusions may not only serve each raagician for life, but become, for a time, sinaply indistinguish- able from realities. Now, as we said before, we see no great harm in this. It is, to say the least, a very amiable and brotherly employment ; and were it quite disinterested and honest, it would be closely allied with that virtue which St. Paul exalts above all virtues. But everything has or ought to have its limits. When Boswell at- tempted to defend certain Methodists who had been expelled frora the University of Oxford, Johnson retorted that the University was per- fectly right — " They were examined, and found to be mighty ignorant fellows." " But," said Boswell, " was it not hard to expel them? for I am told they were good beings." " I believe," replied the sage, " that they might be good 134 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION beings, but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden." To our certain knowledge many of those who owe their reputation to the art to which we are referring are good beings, and we have little doubt that most of those who are least scrupulous in practising it are good beings also. Indeed it may be conceded at once that there is always a strong presumption that members of Mutual Admiration Societies belong to this class. On the reciprocity of essentially Christian virtues their very existence depends. Whatever may be thought of their heads, their hearts are pretty sure to be in the right place. They may, it is true, act more in the spirit of the precept that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us than in that of the pre- cept which pronounces that it is more blessed to give than to receive. This, however, is a trifle — one of those distinctions without differences which are so common in Christian ethics. But for ourselves we must, as we have said before, discriminate. To the cow in the field we have no objection ; it is of the cow in the garden that we coruplain. To drop metaphor : there are certain spheres of literary activity in which the circulation of mutual puffery by this clique or by that clique 135 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION can do comparatively little harm to any one or to anything. There are some subjects on which every reader is not only perfectly competent to form his own judgment, but is pretty certain to do so. He may amuse himself by seeing what the critics have to say, and he may be induced by them in the first instance to turn to the book which is in question, but he is practically un- affected by any opinions unless they happen to coincide with his own. Such is the case with books of travel, with novels, and, as a rule, with poetry. Here the arts of the log-roller are as harmless as the frolics of whales with tubs. No one takes what he sees seriously except those who are engaged in the pastime. If Mr. A can- not give the general public what it appreciates, nothing that Mr. B can say will cajole that public into believing that it has what it has not. Mr. C and Mr. D may vociferate, till they are hoarse, that " Mr. E is the subtlest and most discriminating critic that the English-speaking world has ever known " ; but if Mr. E's eulogies of Mr. C's verses and of Mr. D's novels are not corroborated by the general reader's independent judgment, the fame of Messrs. C and D will not extend beyond their clique. If in poetry or prose fiction trash succeeds, as it undoubtedly does, it succeeds not because of the skill vrith which it has been puffed, though this may be a factor in its success, but because it hits the popu- 136 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION lar taste. The public is seldom deceived except when it wishes to be deceived. Log-rolling has much to answer for : it loads our bookstalls with nonsense and rubbish, it irapedes the pro- duction of sound literature, it degrades the standard of taste, it degrades the standard of aim and attainment, and indirectly it is in every way mischievous to literature. But we very much question whether in the case of publica- tions which appeal directly to general readers, and are within the scope of their judgments, the fortune of a book is in any way affected by the arts of the log-roller. Amusement mingled with impatience is probably the pre- vailing sentiment when Mr. C and Mr. D are loud in each other's praises. We remember the amoebaean strains of Hayley and Miss Seward in Porson's epigram : — Miss Seward: Tuneful poet, Britain's glory; Mr. Hayley, that is you. Mr. Hayley : Ma'am, you carry all before you ; Trust me, Lichfield Swan, you do. Miss Seward : Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet ; Mr. Hayley, you're divine. Mr. Hayley : Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it, You yourself are all the nine. Or, in a less good-natured mood, we may per- haps recall with a certain satisfaction Pope's cruel but pathetic picture of the minor log- rollers of his day : — 137 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack, With each, a sickly brother at his back. Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood, Then numbered with the puppies in the mud. But there are certain subjects and certain spheres in which the arts of the log-roller, if equally contemptible, are not quite so harm- less. During the last fifteen years the Press has been teeming with books designed to circulate among readers who are seriously interested in belles lettres and criticism. Some of them have appeared as volumes in a series, some as inde- pendent monographs and manuals, and some in the humbler forrus of editorial introductions and notes. Among them may be found works of really distinguished scholars, and works in every way worthy of such scholars ; and it is no doubt works like these which have given credit and authority generally to publications of this kind. The popularity of these productions has been extraordinary, and their manufacture has become one of the most lucrative of hackney employments. Nor is this all. Their professed purpose is the dissemination of serious instruc- tion, is to become text-books in literary history and in literary criticism ; and, as text-books on those subjects, they have made their way, or are making their way, not merely into our public libraries, but also into the libraries of nearly 138 LOG-EOLLING AND EDUCATION every educational institute in England. Indeed it would not be too much to say that if, among general readers, about eighty in every hundred derive almost all they know about English literature, both historically and critically, from these volumes, in our schools and colleges, the average number of those whose studies are and ought to be independent of them is yearly diminishing. It is of these text-books and of the responsibilities incurred by those who produce and circulate them that we wish to speak. We have already commented on the distinc- tion which must be drawn between what is best and what is inferior in the publications to which we have been referring ; and, in truth, the differ- ence is one not of degree but in kind. As our desire is, in Swift's phrase, to lash the vice but spare the name, we shall not specify the works which we have selected as typical of log-rolling in relation to education. Till we saw them we had no conception of the lengths to which this sort of thing has run. Ostensibly the works before us are critical and biographical mono- graphs designed to become text-books for students of English literature ; they may be more correctly described as complete epitomes of the art of puffery. The writers begin by assuming that the objects of their ludicrous adulation — who are, like themselves, contribu- 139 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION tors of the average order to current periodicals, and the authors of monographs similar to their own — are by general consent critics of classical authority. The most deferential references are made to them in almost every page. Now it is " Goethe and Mr. So-and-so have observed," or " Coleridge has remarked, but Mr. So-and-so is inclined to think," etc. Sometimes it assumes the form of a sort of awful reverence, as " Mr. So-and-so is a little uncertain, but surely he more than hints," or " Mr. So-and-so, as we all know, was once of opinion, though he has re- cently found reason to alter," etc. We saw not long ago in the notes to a certain edition of a classical author : " Socrates and Mr. X of Trinity have observed," etc. Occasionally this homage expresses itself — and this is more seri- ous — in the form of long extracts from Mr. So- and-so's writings. Nothing is more common in works like these than to find critics and writers of classical authority either completely ignored, or, if cited at all, cited only in the connection which we have indicated. That the gentlemen who are the subjects of this grotesque flattery either have paid or will pay their friends in kind may, of course, be taken for granted. Thus one factitious reputation builds up another, and one bad book ushers in twenty which are worse. Macaulay has an amusing passage in which he 140 LDG-EOLLING AND EDUCATION has collected the names of those who, according to Horace Walpole, were " the first writers " in England in 1753. It might have been expected that Hume, Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Richardson, Smollett, Collins, and Gray would at least have had a place among them. Not at all. They were Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Wil- liams, Mr. Soame Jenyngs, Mr. Cambridge, and Mr. Coventry ; in other words, a clique of politi- cians and men of fashion of the very titles of whose Avritings even a reader tolerably well read in the literature of those times might ex- cusably be ignorant. We are not exaggerating when we say that this system of strenuous and well-directed mutual puffery is, in our own time, leading to similarly perverted conceptions about the relative position of those who owe their celebrity to these ignoble arts and those on w^hose fame Time's test has set its seal, not merely on the part of the general public, but on the part of those who are responsible for the books introduced into schools and educational institutes. We will give an illustration. At a meeting held not long ago, for the purpose of prescribing books for a Reading Society, the choice lay between some of Johnson's Lives, Select Essays by Sainte Beuve, and Select Essays by Matthew Arnold on the one hand, and on the other certain books typical of the literature of which we have been speaking. 141 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION The debate which ensued was very amusing. A member of the committee, a gentleman of conservative temper, strongly urged the claims of Johnson, Sainte Beuve, and Arnold, on the ground that it was the duty of the Society to encourage the study of what was excellent and of classical quality, especially in criticism ; that it was not merely the information contained in a book which had to be considered, but the style, the tone, the touch ; that the mono- graphs proposed as an alternative could scarcely be regarded as of the first order, either in ex- pression or in matter, for he had observed, though he had only glanced at them, several solecisms in grammar and several inaccuracies of statement ; and he concluded by adding that other writings of these particular authors with which he happened to be more familiar had not prejudiced him in their favour. Upon that, another member of the council, who had been busily conning the Press notices inserted in the monographs in question, pleaded their claim to preference. " Dr. Johnson," he remarked, " was no doubt a great man in his day, but his day had long been over ; no one read him now. Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold might be classical and all that, but they were not up to date." He could not talk as an expert on literary matters, and therefore he would not contradict what the former speaker had said, 142 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION "but there could be no doubt that Messrs. So- and-so," the authors of the monographs in ques- tion, "were very big men — bigger men, I should think (glancing at the Press notices in his hand), than Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold. At any rate, everybody has heard of them ; and," he continued, " listen to this." He then pro- ceeded to read out some of the notices, adding that it was difficult, if he might say so without offence, to reconcile what his friend, the pre- ceding speaker, had said with what was said in these notices. He was a little staggered — for, though a simple, he was a shrewd man — when the very remarkable similarity between Mr. A's eulogies of Mr. B and Mr. B's eulogies of Mr. A was pointed out to him, and -when, in reference to anonymous testimony, he was reminded that one voice may have many echoes. It was generally felt, more especially as Mr. A or Mr. B had, we believe, more than one acquaint- ance among the committee, that the debate was taking rather an embarrassing turn. The question was then put to the vote, and the monographs were carried by a majority of three to one. What occurred at this meeting is occurring every day, variously modified, wherever the choice of books is in question, whether in public libraries or in educational institutions. A litera- ture, the sole credentials of which are derived 143 LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION from those who produce and circulate it, is gradually superseding that of our classics. We seem in truth to be losing all sense of the essential distinction between the writings of the average man of letters and those of the masters. 144 OUR LITERARY GUIDES III. BOOKS WORTH READING^ WERE it not for its melancholy significance, this would be one of the most amusing books which it has ever been our fortune to meet with. Of Mr. Frank W. Raffety we have not the honour to know anything, except what we have gathered from this little volume and from its title-page. But he must be a singularly interesting gentleman. His enthusiasm for books, his portentous ignorance of them ; his strenuous desire to improve the popular taste by pleading for the best, his instinctive tendency to make in all cases for the worst ; his sublime intolerance of everything in literature which falls short of excellence, his more than sublime indifference to the commonest rules of grammar and syntax in expressing that intolerance ; the naweM, the frankness, the recklessness with which he displays his incompetence for the task which he has undertaken — in these qualifications ' Books Worth Reading. A Plea for the Best and an Essay towards Selection, with Short Introductions. By- Prank W. Eaffety, London. E.o. 145 K OUR LITERARY GUIDES and accomplishments Mr. Raffety is not perhaps alone, but he has certainly no superior. Mr. Raifety aspires to guide his readers through the chief literatures of the world. Now the task of a reviewer, who has a con- science, is not always a cheerful one, and we confess that, when we had generally surveyed Mr. Raffety's work, we resolved to amuse our- selves by trying to discover of which of the literatures, to which Mr. Raffety constitutes himself a guide, Mr. Raffety is probably ruost ignorant. It is a nice point. Let our readers judge. We will begin with Mr. Raffety and the Classics. Of Theognis, the most voluminous of the Greek Gnomic poets, it is said that " only a few sentences " — Mr. Raffety is presumably under the impression that Theognis wrote in prose — "quoted in the works of Plato and others survive." " The Greek Anthology," we are astounded to learn, "is by Lord Neaves " and " is one of the best volumes in the A.O.E.R. series." What Mr. Raffety no doubt means is, that Lord Neaves is the author of a raonograph on the Greek anthology, as he certainly was. With regard to Herodotus, Mr. Raffety has evidently got some information not generally accessible. His History, we are told, " is a great prose epic. . . . The second book is of the most interest. In other works are the histories of Croesus, Cyrus," etc. It would be interesting to know what other works besides his History 146 OUR LITERARY GUIDES Herodotus has left. Of the Prometheus Bound of ^schylus Mr. Raffety gives the following interesting account. It contains, he says, " the story of Prometheus and his defiance of Jupiter, who condemned him to be bound to a rock, where he died rather than yield." We exhort Mr. RafEety, before his work passes into a second edition, to consult his Classical Dictionary. Of the translations recommended by Mr. Raffety we should very much like to get a sight of the translation of Pindar by Calverley, of the joint translation of the same classic by Messrs. E. Myers and A. Lang, and of the joint translation of Thucydides " by Jowett and Rev. H. Dale, 2 vols." Of Herodotus, of J]jschylus, of Sophocles, of Pindar, of Polybius, of Demos- thenes, what are, by general consent, esteemed the best translations are not so much as men- tioned. Latin literature fares even worse in the hands of our guide. Mr. Raffety appears to know no more about Catullus than that he was a writer of epigrams. Such trifles as the Attis, the Peleus and Thetis, the Julia and Manlius marriage song, the Cotna Berenices, the love lyrics and threnodies he does not conde- scend to notice. In " guiding " his readers to translations of Lucretius and Juvenal, Munro's version of the first in prose and Gifford's version of the second in verse — which Conington pro- nounced to be the best version of any Roman classic in our language — are not so much as 147 OUR LITERARY GUIDES referred to. Nor, again, in the case of Plautus and Terence, are the excellent versions of Thorn- ton and Coleman noticed. Tacitus, who is oddly described as " the foremost man of the day," an estimate which might have pleased but which would certainly have surprised him, chronicled, we are told, " the foundation of the Christian religion." Mr. Raffety's assurance on this point will probably disappoint inquisitive readers. Equally surprising are the portions of the work dealing with the modern literatures. In the course of these we learn that " the Nihe- lungen Lied is the oldest drama in Europe " ; that the Areopagitica and the Defence of the People of England are Milton's best prose writ- ings — Mr. Raffety apparently not being aware that the second work is in Latin, and that if he means the first Defence, it is anything but one of the best of Milton's writings. We are also informed that Dryden was most valuable as a translator from the Greek and Latin ; Dryden's versions from the Greek begin and end with paraphrases of four Idylls of Theoc- ritus, the first book of the Iliad and the parting of Hector and Andromache from the sixth, and are notoriously the very worst things he ever did. Sometimes Mr. Raifety fairly takes our breath away, as when he informs us that Gray's tomb can be seen in the little churchyard of Stoke Pogis "with the Elegy written upon it." Can Mr. 148 OUR LITERARY GUIDES RaflFety be acquainted with the length of the Elegy and with the proportions of a tomb- stone? Chaucer, we are informed, wrote some poems in Italian. We should very much like to see them, and so probably w^ould Professor Skeat, for they appear to have escaped the notice of all Chaucer's editors. Swift's Tale of a Tub was written, we are told, " against the teaching of Hobbes ! " It is indeed impossible to open this book any- where without alighting on some most discredit- able blunder or absurdity. Thus we are informed that Macavilay's essay on Burleigh treats of the time of James I. — Burleigh, as we need hardly say, dying nearly five years before James came to the throne, and Macaulay's essay having no reference at all to James I.'s time. " There is," says Mr. Raffety, "no more stirring lyric than The Cotters Saturday Night" a remark which shows that Mr. Raffety does not know what a lyric poem is. But to look for blunders in Mr. Raffety's pages would be to look for leaves in a summer forest. His critical remarks and bio- graphical notes are truly delightful. We wish we had space to quote some of them. Of their general quality the following profound remark is a fair specimen : — " Dante requires study, and an endeavour after appreciation." Mr. Raffety is always anxious to conduct his readers by short cuts and to save them trouble. Macaulay's Essays, for example, should be read before his 149 OUR LITERARY GUIDES History ; " they will be more easily tackled," he saya, " than the History in the first in- stance." But on the subject of Gibbon Mr. Raffety is adamant, being fully of the late Pro- fessor Freeman's opinion — " Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read." How Gibbon is to be read, or why Gibbon is to be read, or in what edition he should be read, Mr. RafPety does not explain. Now, what possible end can be served by books like these, except to misguide and mis- inform ? Here is a writer, who certainly leaves us with the impression that he cannot read the Greek and Latin classics in the original, setting up as a director of classical study, and pro- nouncing ex cathedra on the merits of transla- tions of these classics. His knowledge of the modern literature is, as is abundantly manifest, though we have neither space nor patience to illustrate, equally insufficient and unsubstantial, and yet he undertakes to initiate and guide the inexperienced in these studies. This book is presented to the public in a most attractive form, being excellently printed on excellent paper, and will naturally be taken seriously by those to whom it appeals. It is for this reason that we also have felt it our duty to take it seriously. And, as we believe that every bad book stands in the way of a good one, we can promise Mr. RafPety, and writers like Mr. Raffety, that we shall continue to take them seriously. 150 THE NEW CRITICISM 1 NEARLY two thousand years ago Horace observed that, though every calling pre- supposed some qualification in those vs^ho fol- lowed it, and a man who knew nothing of marine afPairs would not undertake to manage a ship, or a man who knew nothing of drugs to compound prescriptions, yet everybody fancied himself competent to commence poet. Qualified or unqualified, at it we all go, he complains, and scribble verses. But times have changed, and those who in Horace's day were the pests of poetry, with which they could amuse themselves without mischief, have now become the pests of another kind of literature in which their diversions are not quite so harmless. Where the poetaster once stood the criticaster now stands. The transformation of the one pest into the other, where they do not, as they often do, become both, is easily accounted for, and as Dr. Johnson has so excellently explained it, we ' Retrospective Reviews. A Literary Log. By Eichard Le Gallienne. 2 vols. 151 THE NEW CRITICISM cannot do better than transcribe his words. " Criticism," says the Doctor, " is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be attained is too great to be wil- lingly endured ; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others, and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of critic." But criticasters and their patrons have improved on this — for "he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignor- ant" may, in our time, not merely support his vanity, but support himself. Till we inspected the volumes before us, we had really no conception of the pass to which things have now come in so-called criticism. The writer sits in judgment on most of the authors who have, during recent years, been before the public. He passes sentence not merely on current novelists, poets, and essayists, but on some of our classics, and on books like the late Mr. Pater's Lectures on Plato and Platonisin and Dr. Wharton's edition of Sappho. To any acquaintance with the principles of criticism, to any conception of criticism in relation to principles, to any learning, to any scholarship, to any knowledge of the history of literature and of the masterpieces of literature, 152 THE NEW CRITICISM either in our own language or in other lan- guages, he has not the smallest pretension. Nor does he allow this to be gathered simply from the work itself, where it is, needless to say, abundantly apparent, but with a naivete and impudence which are at once ludicrous and ex- asperating he glories in his ignorance. Litera- ture and its interpretation are to him what the Bible and its interpretation were to the ranting sectaries of Dryden's satire. In its explanation knowledge and learning were folly, nothing was needed but " grace." " No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace, Study and pains were now no more their care, Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer." So to our critic knowledge and learning are of equal unimportance — nay, equally contemptible — and all that is needed to take the measure of Plato and Wordsworth is, in his own words, " the capacity for appreciation." With this very slender outfit he sits down to the work of criti- cism, to enlighten the world de omni scibili in literature, from the lyrics of Sappho, "the singer, a single petal of whose rose is more than the whole rose-garden of later women singers," to " the statesmanlike reach and grasp " of Mr. E. Gosse's essays. To discuss seriously the opinions or impres- sions of a writer of this kind would be as absurd as to attempt to fight gnats with a sword, and 153 THE NEW CRITICISM we shall merely content ourselves with tran- scribing, without comment, a few of the aphorisms with which these volumes are studded. " Criti- cism is the art of praise." " Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, not because he created Hamlet and Lear, but because he could write that speech about Perdita's flowers and Claudio's speech on death in Measure for Measure." " The perfection of prose is the essay, of poetry the lyric, and the most beautiful book is that which contains the most beautiful words." These specimens will probably suffice. Mr. Le Gal- lienne is also of opinion that " culture is mainly a matter of temperament "—that " a man is born cultvired," that mere education and study are to such a one not simply superfluities, but impertinences. " What matters it,'' he elo- quently asks, " that one does not remember or even has never read great writers? Our one concern is to possess an organization open to great and refined impressions." A paltry scholar, for example, may be able to construe Sappho, but it is only " an organization open to great and refined impressions " which can discern (in a crib) " the pathos of eternity in sorae twenty words " of " this passionate singer of Lesbos." Plato may be studied by poor pedants, but to an organization of this kind the binding of a volume is sufficient enlightenment; "to merely hold in the hand and turn over its pages is a counsel in style," for do not " the temperate beauty, the 154 THE NEW CRITICISM dry beauty beloved of Plato, find expression in the sweet and stately volume itself " [he is " re- viewing " the late Mr. Pater's lectures on Plato], "with its smooth night-bluo binding, its rose- leaf yellow pages, its soft and yet grave type " ? The value of Mr. Le Gallienne's judgments, of his praise, and of his censure, which, ludicrous to relate, are quoted by some publishers as recommendations, or " opinions of the press," may be estimated by these dicta, and by this theory of a critical education. Macaulay somewhere speaks of a certain non- descript broth which, in some Continental inns, was kept constantly boiling, and copiouslypoured, without distinction, on every dish as it came up to table. The writer of these essays appears, metaphorically speaking, to be provided with a similar abomination. Whatever be his theme, poem, essay, novel, picture, he contrives to serve it up with the same condiment, a sickly and nauseous compound of preciosity and senti- mentalism. The melancholy thing about all this is the profound unconsciousness on the part of the author of these volumes that he is exciting ridicule ; that he is, in Shakespeare's phrase, making himself a motley to the view. But there are considerations more melancholy still. We should not have noticed these volumes had they not been representative and typical of a school of so-called critics which is becoming 155 THE NEW CRITICISM more and more prominent. Incredible as it may seem, there are certain sections of literary society and of the general public which take Mr. Le Gallienne and his dicta quite seriously, and to which the prodigious nonsense in these volumes does not present itself as absurdity, but as the articles of a creed. These essays have, moreover, appeared in publications the names of some of which carry authority. It is, therefore, high time that some stand should be made, some protest entered against writings which cannot fail to corrupt popular taste and to degrade the standard of popular literature. Of one thing we are very certain, that no self-respecting literary journal which undertook to review these volumes could allow them to pass without denunciation. Of Mr. Le Gallienne we know nothing per- sonally. He is, if we are rightly informed, still a young raan, and we would in all kindness exhort him to turn the abilities which he un- doubtedly possesses to better account. There is much in these essays which shows that he was intended for something better than to further the decadence. If, instead of sneering at scholars, affecting to despise learning and study, indulging in silly paradoxes, tinsel epigrams, and absurd generalisations, he would read and think, and endeavour to do justice to himself and to his opportunities, he might, we make no doubt, obtain an honourable reputation. There is much 156 THE NEW CRITICISM which is attractive in his work, and in the personality reflected in it. He is not a char- latan, for though he is ignorant, he is honest. Genial and sympathetic, he has much real critical insight, and, in going through his volumes, we have noted many remarks which were both sound and fine. At its best his style is excellent, — clear, lively, and engaging. Let him cease to play the buffoon, which can only end in his gaining the applause of mere fools and the contempt of every one else. 157 THE GENTLE ART OF SELF- ADVERTISEMENT THE illustrious Barnum once observed that, if a man's capital consisted of a shilling, one penny of that shilling should be spent in purchasing something, and the remaining eleven- pence should be invested in advertising what was purchased. There was, perhaps, a touch of ex- aggeration in that great man's remark, but it was founded on a profound knowledge both of human nature and of the world. Intrinsically nothing is valuable ; things are what we make or imagine them. Even the diamond, as a costly commodity, exists on suffrage. If a m.an cannot persuade his fellow-creatures that he has genius, talent, learning, " 'twere all alike as if he had them not." What Persius asks with a sneer, " Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?" — is your knowledge nothing, unless some one else know that you are knowing ? — a wiser man would ask in all seriousness. Shakespeare was never nearer the truth than when he wrote — 158 GENTLE ART OF SELF-ADVERTISEMENT " No man is the lord of anything, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicates his parts to others ; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they are extended." And never was a man more mistaken than the old preacher who said to his congregation, " If you have a talent in your napkin, you should take care not to hide it ; but if you have no talent, but only a napkin, you should not so flourish your napkin as to create the impression that it is full of talents." Why, this is just what nine men in ten w^ho court fame have to do. Nature is kind, but seldom profuse. If she really endows a man with what, if trumpeted, would make him famous, the odds are she couples with her gifts pride, modesty, or self- respect, which, to say the least, heavily handicap him in the race for reputation. When she does not endow with the reality, she compensates by bestowing the power of acquiring the credit for it. She is, as a rule, much too thrifty to heap on the same man the keen pleasures of genuine enthusiasm and the sweets of popular applause. An impartial mother, she loves all her children, and divides her favours equally between shams and true men. This Churchill marks in his brutal way ; speaking of a certain contemporary, he describes him as endowed with " That low cunning which in fools supplies, And amply too, the place of being wise, 159 THE GENTLE ART OF Whicli Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gave To qualify the blockhead for a knave." But our business is not with knaves and block- heads, but with " gentler cattle," and the quota- tion demands an apology. The importance of the art of self-advertise- ment, as must be abundantly clear from the preceding remarks, can scarcely be overesti- mated. Though it is perhaps still in its infancy, its progress during the last few years has been most encouraging. The old coarse methods so familiar to us in the past, and still successfully practised in the present — we mean rautual ad- miration cliques, log-rolling, and what is vul- garly known as " pulling the strings " — have been greatly improved upon and refined. Bent- ley's famous remark when, explaining how it was that he took to commentating, he said, that as he despaired of standing on his own legs in the Temple of Fame, he got on to the shoulders of the Ancients, appears to have suggested one of the most ingenious of modern expedients. This consists of "getting up" a memorial to some distinguished man — a statue, it may be, or modest bust. Some labour, some ability, and some learning are involved in the more cumbrous device of Bentley. But here all is simple and very easy. You are on the shoulders of your great man at a bound, and stand side by side with him in a trice. There is nothing which redounds to his credit which 160 SELF-ADVERTISEMENT does not redound to your own. As the Red Indian is under the impression that in possess- ing himself of a scalp he possesses himself of the virtues belonging to the former owner of the scalp, so this tribute of enthusiastic admira- tion quietly assumes, without trouble, all that enthusiastic admiration naturally implies. Is the object of your homage a poet, a critic, a scholar, the very fact that you pay him homage is, in itself, testimony of your own right to one or other of these honourable titles. If, more- over it should happen that you know very little about the writings of the author whom you have elected to honour, this is of no consequence ; for of all the disguises which ignorance can assume, " enthusiasm " is the most effective. Nor are these the only advantages of this particular method of getting reputation. The collection of subscriptions and the formation of a committee bring you into contact, or may, if judiciously managed, bring you into contact with all your distinguished contemporaries ; and we know what the proverb says — " Noscitur a sociis " — a man is what his companions are. But nothing is more effectual, for purposes of self-advertisement, than a device which has lately been practised with signal success. This consists of scraping up an acquaintance with some per- son, w^hose name is not unknown to the public, — even a second-rate novelist will do — and wait- ing till he dies. As there is a tide in the affairs B.C. 181 L THE GENTLE AET OF of men, so, as we all know, there is a moment at the demise of literary men when the voracity of pubUc curiosity knows neither distinction nor satiety. This is the moment for the self -adver- tiser to nick ; this is the time for him to float, with his defunct friend, on the lips of men. He will find readers for anything he may choose to print — that letter with its exquisite compli- ments, that conversation in which his poor attainments were so generously over-estimated, or the importance of his slight literary services so much exaggerated. Of course, the value of such advertisements will be in proportion to the eminence of the subject of the reminiscences — and happy, thrice happy, those who were able to turn men like Darwin, Tennyson, and Browning to this account ; their reputation may be re- garded as made. But it is not always necessary to wait till great men die, though it is an ex- periment too bold and perilous for most as- pirants to make this sort of capital out of them while they are still alive. Still audentes fortuna juvat, and it has been done. A certain minor poet published in an American magazine, not many years ago, an article entitled "A Day with Lord Tennyson," in which he represented the Laureate as turning the conversation on his (the minor bard's) poetry. We are told how the great man, after fervently reiterating a stanza of that minor bard which pleased him, requested his son to take it down in writing ; how that son, 162 SELF-ADVERTISEMENT though the day was cold and blowy, took it down ; how Tennyson grasped, at parting, his brother poet's hand, and begged in transport that he would " come again and come often." He came, we believe, no more. But what of that? He had accomplished a feat so simple and yet so original that it may fairly be ques- tioned whether what Mr. Burnum used to call his masterpiece was in any way comparable to it. To interview a great man, even on an as- sumption of equality, is, as we all know, a com- paratively easy matter, but to turn the conver- sation of the great man into a seasonable puff of yourself requires a combination of qualities not often united in a single person. The worst of feats like these is that they must have a ten- dency to make great men a little shy of en- couraging the acquaintance of those to whom they can be so useful. But simplicity, as Thucy- dides remarks, is one of the chief ingredients of greatness, and it is a quality very difficult to wear out. If Tennyson's interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed — for the benefit of youthful ambition — in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose ; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, there- 163 GENTLE ART OF SELF-ADVERTISEMENT fore, to the following exquisitely ingenious de- vice. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled Gems from English Literature, thus arranged : Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching him- self regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets — Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman's expedient — it may be judiciously modified — to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety. 164 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS » THE late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his siirroundings appear to have been most un- congenial ; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor ; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature's favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact w^ith all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course in * The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols. 165 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS many respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection ; it imported a certain feverishness mto his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these cir- cumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. " He stands," says his friend Professor Colvin, " as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms — the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure, memoirs ; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten." With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched. But, unhappily, some of Stevenson's admirers have made themselves and their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the comparison will generally be in his favour — he certainly did best what hundreds can do well. His essays have distinc- 166 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS tion and excellence ; his novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the work of Scott, King- ston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very charming personality ; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when we are told that he wiU stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott, and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a statue to him beside the author of Marmion and the Waverley Novels, all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestima- tion. The truth is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as manufacturers of factitious reputa- tions, — the circulators of a false currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them — ^popular essays, tales and novels — as it is to write up the commodities of quack doctors and the shares of bogus com- panies. The production of popular literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the work of deliberate fraud, origin- ating from various motives. In many cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical in- competence, current criticism being, to a con- 167 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS siderable extent, in the hands of very young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it is to be attri- buted to good nature and the tendency in the genial appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of pro- portion to what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that all is im- posture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy ; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole ; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather iruportuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the demand for everything bearing his signature ; when he is dead the very refuse of his study finds eager publishers. This kind of thing has obviously many ad- vantages, which are by no means confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it means business ; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs, and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is printed, will not what he was pleased 168 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS to say, with all the friendly license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be proclaimed from the house-tops ? All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more annoyed at the preposterous eulo- gies of which he has been made the subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before us de- scribed, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as " the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which England has ever seen." We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that his labour has been a labour of love, and that he be- lieved himself to be piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have been given to the world. More than two- thirds have nothing whatever to justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and com- monplace he could be. In their slangy famili- arity and careless spontaneity they remind us of Byron's, but what a contrast do these trivial 169 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS and too often insipid tattlings present to Byron's brilliance and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men ! Only here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflec- tion, do we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which are inter- changed between young men every day in the year. Their one attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson's own charming person- ality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his manliness, his transparent truthful- ness and honesty. It is amusing to watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which this gentleman's persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and yet certain not to disappoint ex- pectant vanity, are quite exquisite. " The suns go swiftly out," he writes to him, referring to the death of Tennyson and Browning and others, " and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms." The indignant letter to the New York Tribune, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson's fictions, well deserves placing on 170 R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS permanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends. We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson's reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabiUe, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and re- tained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment. 171 LITEEAEY ICONOCLASM ^ AMONG the worthies of the fifteenth century- there is no more interesting and pictur- esque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world, tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof that the good King's title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy, but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be two opinions about the Kingis Quair. It is a poem of singular charm and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer's minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is ' The Authorship of the Kingis Quair. A New Criticism by J. T. T. Brown. 172 LITEEARY ICONOCLASM no servile imitation ; it bears the impress of original genius, not so much in details and in- cident as in tone, colour, and touch ; it is a brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly exaggerates when he describes it as "More sweet ttan ever a poet's heart Gave yet to tte English tongue." For more than a hundred years it has been the delight of all who care for the poetry of the past, and the story it tells, and tells so patheti-' cally, is now among the " consecrated legends ' which every one cherishes. " The best poet among kings, and the best king among poets," the name of the author of the Kingis Quair heads the list of royal authors. The stanza which he employed, though invented or adopted by Chaucer, takes its title from the King, and " the rime royal " will be in perpetual evidence of his services to poetry, as the University of St. Andrews will be of his services to learning and education. No generation has passed, from Sir Walter Scott to Mrs. Browning, and from Mrs. Browning to Gabriel Rossetti, which has not been lavish of honour and homage to him. But, it seems, we have all been under a delu- sion. Our simple ancestors believed that James was the author of Peebles to the Play and Christ's Kirk on the Green ; but Peebles to the Play and Christ's Kirk on the Green " are now " — Mr. J. T. T. Brown is speaking — 173 LITERARY lOONOCLASM " relegated to the anonymous poetry of the sixteenth century, inexorably deposed by the internal evidence " ; and Mr. Brown aspires to send the Kingis Quair the same way. His fell purpose is "to deprive James of his singing garment, and reduce him to the humbler rank of a King of Scots." There is something almost terrible in the exultation with which Mr. Brown assumes that — the King's claim to every other poem attributed to him having been completely demolished — it only remains to deprive him of the Kingis Quair, to make his poetical bankruptcy complete. And to the demolition of the King's claim to the " Quair " Mr. Brown ruthlessly pro- ceeds. Now we have no intention of entering into the question of the authenticity of the minor poems to which Mr. Brown refers ; but we shall certainly break a lance with this destructive critic in defence of James's claim to the Kingis Quair. Mr. Brown contends, first, that there is no satisfactory external evidence in favour of the King's authorship of the poem ; and, secondly, that the internal evidence is almost conclusive against him. What are the facts ? In the Bod- leian Library is a MS. the date of which is un- certain, but it cannot be assigned to an earlier period than 1488. This MS. contains certain poems of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and others, together with the Kingis Quair. Of the Kingis Quair it is, so far as is known, the only MS., and 174 LITERAEY ICONOCLASM to it alone we owe the preservation of the poem. Both title and colophon assign the work to James I., the words being : " Heireefter followis the quair Maid be King James of Scotland ye first, callit ye Kingis quair, and Maid quhen his Ma. wes in Ingland," the colophon running, " Explicit, &c., &c., quod Jacobus primus sco- torum rex lUustrissimus." This is surely pre- cise enough ; but Mr. Brown insists that the statement carries very little weight, being no more than the ipse dixit of not merely an irresponsible, but of an unusually reckless copy- ist. The recklessness of this copyist Mr. Brown deduces from the fact that, of ten poems at- tributed to Chaucer in the same MS., five un- doubtedly do not belong to him. On this we shall only remark that it would be interesting to know whether these poems have been attri- buted to Chaucer in other MSS. In any case, Mr. Brown must surely know that it is a very different thing for a copyist to raiss-assign a few short poems and to make a statement so exphcit as the statement here made with re- gard to the Kingis Quair. He must either have been guilty of deliberate fraud — and what right have we to assmne this? — or he m.ust have been misled, an hypothesis which is equally unwarrantable, unless it be adequately supported. And how does Mr. Brown proceed to support it? He contends that we have no satisfactory evidence from other sources that 175 LITERARY ICONOOLASM James was the author of the poem. Walter Bower, the one contemporary historian, though he gives in his Scotichronicon an elaborate ac- count of the King's accomphshments, is silent, Mr. Brown triumphantly observes, about his poetry. This may be conceded. But Weldon is equally silent about the poetry of James VI., and Buchanan about the poetry of Mary. And what says the next historian, John Major? "In the vernacular " — we give the passage in Mr. Brown's own version — "he was a most skilful composer. . . . He wrote a clever little book about the Queen before he took her to wife and while he was a prisoner," a plain reference to the Kingis Quair. Testimony to his poetical ability is also given by Hector Boyes in his History of Scotland, " In lingua vernacula tam ornata faciebat carmina, ut poetam natum credidisses." So say John Bellenden, John Les- lie, and George Buchanan. Of these witnesses Mr. Brown coolly observes that they carry little or no weight, because they only echo each other and Major. Major, Mr. Brown insists, is " the sole authority for the ascription to James of the vernacular poems." Certainly fame in the face of such critics as Mr. Brown is held on a very precarious tenure. Dunbar, in his Lament of the Makaris, enumerates, continues our critic, twenty-one Scottish poets, but passes James over in silence, therefore James's title to being a poet was unknown to him. Possibly ; but 176 LITERARY ICONOCLASM that Dunbar's list was not meant to be ex- haustive is proved by the fact that he makes no mention of a poet, and of a considerable poet, who must have been well known to him, Thomas of Ercildoune. Nothing can be more misleading than deductions like these. Ovid has given us an elaborate catalogue of the poets of his time, but makes no mention of Manilius. Heywood and Taylor have given elaborate catalogues of the contemporary Elizabethan dramatists and make no mention of Cyril Tourneur. Addison has given us an account of the principal English poets, and makes no mention of Shakespeare. If Dante's and Chaucer's acquaintance with their distinguished brethren is to be estimated by those whom they noticed, it must have been far more limited than w^e know it, by other evidence, to have been. Lyndsay, again, is cited as testi- mony of ignorance of Jaraes's title to rank among poets ; but in the list, in which he is silent about James, he is silent about poets so famous as Barbour, Blind Harry, Wyntown, Kennedy, and Douglas. Mr. Brown next proceeds to the question of internal evidence. He cannot understand how it could come to pass, that a Scotchman, who left his native country when he was under twelve years of age, and who was educated by English tutors in England, should, after eighteen years of exile, employ " the Lowland Scottish dialect." This is surely not very difficult to explain. B.C. 177 M LITERARY ICONOCLASM Nothing so much endears his country to a man as exile, and nothing is more cherished by a patriot than his native language. Ten years' exile among the Getae did not corrupt the Latin- ity of Ovid, and more than twenty years' exile did not impair the purity of Thucydides' Attic. The King may have had English tutors, but Wyntown distinctly tells us that he was al- lowed to retain, as his companions, four of his countrjrmen. When he served in France he had a Scottish bodyguard. The document in the King's own handwriting, printed by Chalmers, proves that in 1412 he was conversant with the Lowland dialect. In all probability, therefore, he carefully cherished his native language. The consensus of tradition places it beyond all doubt that he composed poetry in the vernacular, and as he wrote the Kingis Quair when he knew that he was about to return to Scotland as its king, it was surely the most natural thing in the world that he should compose a poem which told the story of himself and his young bride, whom he was introducing to his subjects as their queen, in the language of the country. But, says Mr. Brown, it is the Lowland dialect, with inflex- ions peculiar to Midland English, with many Chaucerian inflections engrafted on it. And what more natural ? The Midland dialect was the dialect of his English teachers. The poems of Chaucer he probably had by heart. Mr, Brown's object in all this is to relegate 178 LITERARY ICONOOLASM the Kingis Quair to that group of poems which are represented by the Romaunt of the Rose, The Court of Love, and Lancelot of the Lak, which appeared late in the fifteenth century, and in which all these peculiarities are very pronounced. Into philological details we have not space to enter, but this we will say. We will admit that ane before a consonant, the past participle in yt or it, the pronouns thaire and thame, the plural form quhilkis, the employ- ment of the verb to do in the emphatic conjuga- tion and the like, are peculiarities which belong to a period not earlier than about 1440, and that all these peculiarities are to be found in the poem. But, we contend that these are just as likely to be due to the transcriber as they are to the author. Nothing was so common with copyists as to import into their texts the peculiarities of their own dialects, indeed it was habitual with them. Thus Hampole's Pricke of Conscience was greatly altered by southern scribes. Thus, in the Bannatyne MS., Chaucer's minor poems were similarly altered by northern scribes. It is, in truth, the very height of rashness to dispute the genuineness of an original, in con- sequence of the presence of peculiarities which might quite well have been imported into it by a copyist. The resemblances between this poem and the Court of Love are, we admit, not likely to have been mere coincidences, and we are quite ready to admit that the Court of Love 179 LITERARY ICONOCLASM in the form in which we have it now, must be assigned to a much later date, more than a century later, than the date (1423) assigned to the Kingis Quair. But this is certain — that many, and very many, of the resemblances between the two poems are to be attributed to the fact that the writers were saturated with the influence of Chaucer, and delighted in imitating and recalling his poetry. If, again, it be assumed that one poem was the exemplar of the other, this is indisputable, that the Court of Love was modelled on the Kingis Quair, and not the Kingis Quair on the Court of Love. For, setting aside peculiarities which may be assigned to transcribers, there can be httle doubt that the Court of Love belongs to the sixteenth century at the very earliest, while Mr. Brown himself admits that the MS. of the Kingis Quair may be approximately fixed at 1488. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than Mr. Brown's attempt to show that the poem breaks down in autobiographical details, and that it derives these details from Wyntown's Chronicle. James does not mention the exact year in which he was taken prisoner. He tells us that he commenced his voyage when the sun had begun to drive his course upward in the sign of Aries, that is, on or about the 12th of March — and that he had not far passed the state of innocence, " bot nere about the nowmer of zeris thre " — in 180 LITERARY ICONOOLASM other words, that he was about ten years of age. Hereupon Mr. Brown, assuming that Wyntown gives the date of the King's birth correctly, pro- ceeds to point out that the King was not at this time " about ten," but that he was about eleven and a half ; and then asks triumphantly whether James would have been likely to forget his own age. Again, he contends that the King's capture could not have taken place in March, because it is highly probable that at the end of February, or at the beginning of March, the King was in the Tower. For the fact that he was in the Tower at that date there is not an iota of proof, or even of tolerably satisfactory presumptive evidence. How the author of the Kingis Quair could have been indebted to Wyntown's Chronicle for the autobiographical details it is, indeed, difficult to see. The poem gives March as the date of the capture ; the Chronicle gives April. According to the poem, the King's age at the time of his capture was about ten ; according to the Chronicle, about eleven and a half. The Chronicle gives the year of the cap- ture ; the poem does not. The Chronicle gives details not to be found in the poem ; the poem details not to be found in the Chronicle. Mr. BroAvn has no authority whatever for asserting that Book IX. chap. xxv. of the Chronicle was certainly written years before James returned to Scotland. All we know about the Chronicle is that it was finished between the 3rd of 181 LITERARY ICONOCLASM September, 1420, and the return of James in April, 1424. Mr. Brown must forgive us for expressing regret that he should have wasted so much time and learning, in attempting to support a para- dox which can only serve to perplex and mis- lead. Scholars, especially in these days, wotild do well to remember, that nothing can justify destructive criticism but a conscientious desire, on the part of those who apply it, to correct error and to discover truth. And they would also do well to ponder over Bacon's weighty words : " Like as many substances in Nature which are solid do putrify and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and, as I may term them, vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter nor goodness of sub- stance." 182 WILLIAM DUNBAR^ BOSWELL tells us that he once offered to teach Dr. Johnson the Scotch dialect, that the sage might enjoy the beauties of a certain Scotch pastoral poem, and received for his reply, " No, sir ; I will not learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it." It would not be true to say that Dr. Johnson's indifference to the Scotch language and to Scotch poetry has been shared by all cultivated Enghshmen, but it has certainly been shared by a very large majority in every generation. The superb merit of many of the Scotch ballads, the lyrics of Burns and the novels of Scott have practically done little to diminish this majority and to induce English readers to acquire the knowledge which Dr. Johnson disdained. Nine Englishmen out of ten read Burns, either with an eye uneasily fishing the glossary at the bottom of the page, or ad sensum, that is, in contented ignorance of about three words in every nine. ' William Dunbar. By Oliphant Smeaton. Edinburgh : Oliphant. 183 WILLIAM DUNBAR And this is, perhaps, all that can reasonably be expected of the Southerner. Life is short ; the world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion and Scotch manners is not, as Matthew Arnold ob- served, a lovely one, and the time which such an accomplishment would require would be far more profitably spent in acquiring, say, the language of Dante and Ariosto, or even the language of the Romancero General and of Cer- vantes. A modern reader may stumble, with more or less intelligence, through a poem of Burns, catching the general sense, enjoying the lilt, and even appreciating the niceties of rhythm. But this is not the case with the Scotch of the fifteenth century — the golden age of the vernacular poetry, the age when poets were writing thus : — " Catyvis, wreoliis, and ockeraris, Hud-pykis, hurdaris, and gadderaris, All with that warlo went ; Out of thair throttis thay schot on udder Hett moltin gold, me thocht, a fudder As fyre-flawcht, maist fervent, Ay as thay tumit them of sohot, Feyndis fild thame new up to the thrott With gold of allkin prent." The usual conseqiiences have been the result of this ignorance. The Scotch have had it all their own way in estimating the merits of their vernacular classics, and the few outsiders whether English or German, who have made the Scotch language and literature a special 184 WILLIAM DUNBAR subject of study, have very naturally not been willing to underestimate the value of what it has cost them labour to acquire, and so have supported the exaggerated estimates of the Scotch themselves. What Voltaire so absurdly said of Dante, that his reputation was safe be- cause no intelligent people read him, is literally true of such poets as Henryson, Douglas, and Dunbar. We simply take them on trust, and, as with most other things which are taken on trust, we seldom trouble ourselves about the titles and guarantees. It may be accepted as an uncontrolled truth that the world is al- ways right, and very exactly right, in the long run. That mysterious tribunal which, resolved into the individuals which compose it, seems resolved into every conceivable source of ignor- ance, error, and folly, is ultimately infallible. There are no mismeasurements in the reputa- tion of authors with whom readers of every class have been familiar for a hundred years. But, in the case of minor writers who appeal only to a minority, critical literature is the record of the most preposterous estimates. The history of the building up of these pseudo- reputations is generally the same in all cases. First we have the obiter dictum of some famous man whose opinion naturally carries authority, uttered, it may be, carelessly in conversation, or committed, without deliberation, to paper, in a letter or occasional trifle. Then comes some 185 WILLIAM DUNBAR little man, who takes up in deadly seriousness what the great man has said, and out comes, it may be, an essay or article. This wakes up some dreary pedant, who follows with an " edition " or " Study," which naturally elicits from some kindred spirit a sympathetic review. Thus the ball is set rolling, or, to change the figure, bray swells bray, echo answers to echo, and the thing is done. Meanwhile, all that is of real interest and importance in the author thus resuscitated is lost sight of ; in advocating his factitious claims to attention his real claims are ignored. For the true point of view is substituted a false, and the whole focus of criticism, so to speak, is deranged. The first requisite in estimating the work and relative position of a particular author is the last thing which these enthusiasts seem to consider, that is, the application of standards and touchstones derived not simply from the study of the author himself, but from acquaintance with the prin- ciples of criticism, and with what is excellent in universal literature. All this has been illustrated in the case of the poet who is the subject of the volume before us. As Mr. Ruskin has pronounced Aurora Leigh to be the greatest poem of this century, so Sir Walter Scott, who has, by the way, been singularly unjust to Lydgate and Hawes, pronounced Dunbar to be "a poet unrivalled by any that Scotland has ever produced." a 186 WILLIAM DUNBAR reckless judgment which he could never have expressed dehberately. Ellis followed suit, and in Ellis' notice Dunbar is " the greatest poet Scotland has produced." These judgments have, in effect, been reverberated by successive Avriters and editors. In due time, some fourteen years ago, appeared the inevitable German mono- graph, " William Dunbar : sein Leben und seine Gedichte," by Dr. J. Schipper, to whom Mr. Oliphant Smeaton appropriately and reverently inscribes the present monograph. In Mr. OUphant Smeaton's work Dunbar assumes the proportions which might be ex- pected — he is a " mighty genius." " The peer, if not in a few qualities, the superior of Chaucer and Spenser. By the indefeasible passport of the supreme genius he has an indisputable title to the apostolic succession of British poetry to that place between Chaucer and Spenser, that place which can only be claimed by one whose genius was co-ordinate with theirs." As probably eight out of every ten of Mr. Smeaton's readers will know nothing more of Dunbar than what Mr. Smeaton chooses to tell them, and as we, considering the space at our disposal, can- not refute him by a detailed examination of Dunbar's works, it is fortunate that he has given us a succinct illustration of the value of his critical judgment. The following are four typical stanzas of a poem which Mr. Smeaton ranks with MUton's Lycidas and Shelley's 187 WILLIAM DUNBAR Adonais ; we give them as Mr. Smeaton gives them, modernised : — "I that in health was and gladness Am troubled now with great sickness. Enfeebled with infirmity, Timor mortis conturhat me. " Our pleasure here is all vain glory, This false world is but transitory. The flesh is brittle, the fiend is slee, Timor mortis conturhat me. " The state of man doth change and vary. Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary Now dancing merry, now like to dee, Timor mortis conturhat me. " No state on earth here stands sicker, As with the wind waves the wicker. So waves this world's vanity, Timor mortis conturhat me." As the following is pronounced to be one of the finest stanzas Dunbar ever penned, it is interesting as illustrating what is, in Mr. Smea- ton's opinion, the best work of this rival of Chaucer and Spenser : — ' Have mercy, love, have mercy, lady bright; What have I wrought against your womankeid. That you should murder me a sackless wight. Trespassing on you nor in word nor deed ? That ye consent thereto, God forbid ; Leave cruelty and save your man for shame, Or through the world quite losed is your name." It may be added that what are by far the finest 188 WILLIAM DUNBAR passages in Dunbar's poems are passed unnoticed and unquoted by Mr. Smeaton. Indeed, his acquaintance witb Dunbar, or, at all events, his taste in selection, is exactly on a par with that of Ned Softley's with Waller. " As that admir- able writer has the best and worst verses among our English poets, Ned," says Addison, " has got all the bad ones by heart, which he repeats upon occasion to show his reading." Should Mr. Smeaton ever meet his idol in Hades, we woidd in aU kindness advise him to avoid an encounter ; let him remember that the fulsome eulogy is his own, but that the verses quoted are the poet's. Attempted murder — so the irate shade might argue — is less serious than com- pulsory suicide. Dunbar was undoubtedly a man of genius, but a reference to the poets who immediately preceded him will make large deductions from the praises lavished on him by his eulogists. He struck no new notes. The Thistle and the Rose and The Golden Terge are mere echoes of Chaucer and Lydgate, and, in some degree, of the author of The King's Quair, and are indeed full of plagiarisms from them. The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins is probably little more than a faithful description of a popular mum- mery. His moral and religious poems had their prototypes, even in Scotland, in such poets as Johnston and Henryson. His most remarkable characteristic is his versatility, which ranges 189 WILLIAM DUNBAR from the composition of such poems as The Merle and the Nightingale to the Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, from such lyrics as the Meditation in Winter to such lyrics as the Plea for Pity. Mr. Sm.eaton calls him "a giant in an age of pigmies." The author or authoress of The Flower and the Leaf was infinitely superior to him in point of style, Henryson was infinitely superior to him in originality, and Gavin Douglas at least his equal in power of expression and in description. Let us do Dunbar the justice which Mr. Smeaton has not done him, and take him at his very best. Here is part of a picture of a May morning, — " For mirtli of May, wyth skippis and wyth lioppis The birdis sang upon the tender croppis, "With curiouse notis, as Venus Chapell clerkis. The rosis yong, new spreding of their knoppis, War powderit bryoht with hevinly beriall droppis ; Throu hemes rede, birnyng as ruby sperkis, The skyes rang for schoutyng of the larkis." This is brilliant and picturesque rhetoric touched into poetry by the " Venus Chapell clerkis," and the magical note in the last line ; so too the touch in The Golden Terge, liken- ing the faery ship to " blossom upon the spray." But in his allegorical poem he is too fond of the "quainte enamalit termes," and his verse has a certain metallic ring. It will be admitted, we suppose, that the best of his moral poems 190 WILLIAM DUNBAR would be The Merle and the Nightingale and " Be Merrie Man " ; but the utmost which can be said for them is, that the philosophy is ex- cellent and its expression adequate ; that is, that they have little to distinguish them from hundreds of other poems of the same class. In speaking of Dunbar's satires, Mr. Smeaton indulges himself in the following nonsense, " From the genial, jesting, and ironical incon- grmties of Horace and Persius we are intro- duced at once into the bitter, vitriolic scourgings of Juvenal," and in the following rhodomontade, telling us that they unite " the natural direct- ness of Hall, the subtle depth of Donne, the delicate humour of Breton, the sturdy vigour of Dryden, the scalding, vitriolic bitterness of Swift, the pimgency of Churchill, the rural smack of Gay, united to an approach at least to the artistic perfection of Pope." Stuff like this and indiscriminate eulogy are, no doubt, much easier to produce than an estimate of a writer's historical position and importance. Of the relation of Dunbar to his predecessors and contemporaries in England and Scotland, of his prototypes and models in French and Provencal literature, of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised on subsequent poetry, and especially on Spenser, Mr. Smeaton has nothing to say. It never seems to occur to him that his hero, like every one else, must have had his limita- tions, that " the many-sidedness of that genius 191 WILLIAM DUNBAR which has a ring " — the metaphors are not ours, but Mr. Smeaton's — " almost Shakespearian, about it," could hardly have been distinguished by uniformity of excellence ; that " that painter of contemporary manners, who had all the vividness of a Callot, united to the broad humour of a Teniers and the minute touch of a Meissonier," who "reflected in his verse the most delicate nuances, as well as the most startling colours of the age wherein he hved," must have had degrees in success. We have singled out this volume for special notice, not because of any intrinsic title it possesses to serious attention, but because it is tj^ical of a species of literature which is rapidly becoming one of the pests of our time. While every encouragement should be given to sober, judicious, and competent reviews of our older writers, every discouragement should be given, out of respect to the dead, as well as in the interests of the living, to such books as the present. For they are as mischievous as they are ridiculous. They misinform ; they mislead ; they corrupt, or tend to corrupt, taste. After laying down a volume like this we feel, and we expect Dunbar would have felt, that there is something much more formidable than the old horror, " the candid friend," even that in- dicated by Tacitus — pessimuTn inimicorum genus — laudantes. 192 A GALLOP THEOUGH ENGLISH LITERATURE ' THERE is a breeziness and hilarity, a gay irresponsibility and abandon, about M. Jusserand which is perfectly delightful. He is the very Autolycus of History and Criticism. What more sober students, who have some con- science to trouble them, are " toiling all their lives to find " appears to be his as a sort of natural right. The fertility of his genius is such, that it seems to blossom spontaneously into erudition. Like the lilies he toils not, but unlike the lilies he spins, and very pretty gossamer too. It is impossible to take him seriously. The truth is that M. Jusserand belongs to a class of writers which, thanks to indulgent publishers, a more indulgent public, and most indulgent reviewers, is just now greatly in the ascendant. " Encyclopaedical heads," who took all knowledge for their province, probably died ' A Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance. By J. J. Jusserand. E.G. 193 N A GALLOP THROUGH with Bacon, but encyclopaedical heads who take all Literature or all History for their province appear to be as common as the " excellence " which, in opposition to Matthew Arnold's opin- ion, the American lady raaintained was so abundant on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the gentlemen who complacently sit down "to edit the Literatures of the world," or "to trace the development of the human race, from its picturesque cradle in the valleys of Central Asia, to its infinite ramifications in our own day " — within " the moderate compass of an octavo volume." M. Jusserand's first feat is to dispose of some six centuries in ninety-three pages, in a narra- tive which simply tells over again, though cer- tainly after a more jaunty fashion, what Ten Brink, Henry Morley, and others have told much more seriously, and, we may add, much more effectively. The Norman Conquest and an ac- count of the Anglo-Norman literature occupy about a hundred and ten pages, while some eighty pages more, dealing with the fusion of the races and the gradual evolution of the Eng- lish people and language, bring us to Chaucer. It might have been expected that M. Jusserand would have justified his survey of a period so often reviewed before, either by tracing, with more fulness and precision than his predeces- sors, the successive stages in the development of our nationality and its expression in literature, 194 ENGLISH LITERATURE or by adding to our knowledge of the character- istics and peculiarities of the literature itself. He has done neither. He has, on the contrary, obscured the first by the constant introduction of irrelevant matter, and he has apparently no notion of the relative importance of the authors on whose works he dilates or touches. Thus Richard Rolle of Hampole fills more space than Layamon, whose work is despatched in a page ! Thus two lines in a note suffice for the Ormulum, two lines for Mannyng's Handlyng of Synne, a singularly interesting and significant work, ten lines for Robert of Gloucester, who is rather perplexingly described as " a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay," while four pages are accorded to Tristan and five to the Roman du Renart. How the Latin Chroniclers fare may be judged from the fact that a little more than a page serves for Geoffrey of Monmouth, a line for Ordericus Vitalis, and two for Giraldus Cambrensis. In the chapter on Chaucer M. Jusserand does more justice to his subject, and it is to be regretted for his own sake that he has not confined himself to such essays. He is never safe except when he is on the beaten path. Nothing could be more inadequate than the section on Gower. It certainly indicates that M. Jusserand is not very familiar with the Confessio Amantis. Not one word is said about the remarkable prologue, and to dismiss such a work in less than three pages, observing 195 A GALLOP THROUGH that " it contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told, one, the adventure of Florent, being, per- haps, related even better than in Chaucer," is not quite what we should expect in a work pur- porting to narrate the " literary history of the English people." M. Jusserand has not even taken the trouble to keep pace with modern investigation in his subject, but actually tells us that Gower's Speculum Meditantis is lost ! If Gower's writings are not of much intrinsic value, they are of immense importance from an historical point of view. John de Trevisa, a most important name in the history of English prose, is despatched in eight lines of mere biblio- graphical information, without a word being said about his great services to our literature, and without any reference being made either to the remarkable preface to his great work, or to his version of the Dialogue attributed to Occam. The only satisfactory chapter in the book is the chapter dealing with Langland and his works ; but it is certainly surprising that no account should be given of the very remarkable anonymous poem entitled Piers Ploughmans Crede. Again, whole departments of literature, such as the Metrical Romances, the Laies, Fab- liaux, early lyrics and ballads, are most inade- quately treated, some of the most memorable and typical being not even specified. Surely Minot was not a man to be dismissed, with a 196 ENGLISH LITERATURE flippant joke, in half a page, or King Horn and Havelok poems to be relegated to passing refer- ence in a note. But it is in dealing with the literature of the fifteenth century that M. Jusserand's superfici- ality and, to put it plainly, incompetence for his ambitious task become most deplorably appar- ent. In treating the earlier periods he had trustworthy guides even in common manuals, and he could not go far wrong in accepting their generalizations and statements. Books easily attainable, and indeed in everybody's hands, could enable him to dance airily through the Anglo-Saxon literature and through the period between Layamon and Chaucer. No one can now very well go wrong in Chaucer and his contemporaries, who has at his side some half-dozen works which any library can supply. But it is otherwise with the literature of the fifteenth century. Here, as every one who happens to have paid particular attention to it knows, popular manuals and histories are most misleading guides. Deterred, no doubt, by the prolixity of the poetry and by the com- paratively uninteresting nature of the prose literature, modern historians and critics have contented themselves with accepting the ver- dicts of Warton and his followers, who prob- ably had as little patience as themselves ; and so a kind of conventional estimate has been formed, which appears and reappears in every 197 A GALLOP THROUGH manual and handbook. We turned, therefore, with much curiosity to this portion of M. Jus- serand's work. We had, we own, our suspicions about his first-hand knowledge of the literature through which he glided so easily in the earlier portions of his book, and here, we thought, would be the crucial test of his pretension to original scholarship. Would he do voluminous Lydgate the justice which, as the specialist knows, has so long been withheld from him? Would he point out the strong human interest of Hoccleve ; the great historical interest of Hardyng ; the power and beauty of the ballads ; or, if he included Hawes within the century, would he show what a singularly interesting poem, intrinsically and historically, the Pastime of Pleasure really is ? If, again, he included the Scotch poets, how would he deal with the problems presented by Huchown? Would he accord the proper tribute to the genius of Dun- bar ; would he estimate what poetry owes re- spectively to James I., Henry the Minstrel, Robert Henryson, and Gavin Douglas ? In our prose literature, would he comment on the great importance of Pecock's memorable work, of Fortescue's two treatises, of the Paston Letters, of Caxton's various publications ? How would he deal with the one " classical " work of the century, Malory's Morte d' Arthur? Now, of Lydgate, " to enumerate whose pieces," says Warton, " would be to write the 198 ENGLISH LITERATURE catalogue of a little library," it is not too much to say that he was one of the most richly gifted of our old poets, that as a descriptive poet he stands almost on the level of Chaucer, that his pictures of Nature are among the gems of their kind, that his pathos is often exquisite, " touch- ing," as Grray said of him, "the very heart- strings of compassion with so masterly a hand as to merit a place among the greatest of poets." His humour is often delightful, and his pictures of contemporary life, such as his London Idckpenny and his Prologue to the Storie of Thebes, are as vivid as Chaucer's. In versatility he has no rival among his predecessors and contemporaries. Gray notices that, at times, he approaches sublimity. His style often is beautiful, — fluent, copious, and at its best emi- nently musical. The influence which he ex- ercised on subsequent English and Scotch literature would alone entitle him to a promi- nent position in any history of English poetry. But the handbooks think otherwise, and he occupies just three pages in M. Jusserand's work, the only estimate of his work being conflned to the assertion that " he was a worthy man if ever there was one, industrious and prolific," etc., and the only criticism is the re- mark that his " prosody was rather lax." And this is how poor Lydgate fares at our his- torian's hands. To Hoccleve are assigned just one page and a few lines. Hardyng figures only 199 A GALLOP THROUGH in the bibliography at the bottom of a page. The ballads are despatched in fifteen lines. Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, memorable alike both for the preciseness with which it marks the transition from the poetry of mediaevalism to that of the Renaissance, for its probable influ- ence on Spenser, and for its intrinsic charm, its pathos, its picturesqueness, and its sweet and plaintive music, is curtly dismissed, as the hand- books dismiss it, as "an allegory of unendurable dulness." If M. Jusserand would throw aside the manuals and turn to the original, he would probably see reason to modify his verdict. Our author's breathless gallop through the Scotch poets, to whom he allots nine pages, can only be regarded with silent astonishment by readers who happen to known anything about those most remarkable men. Huchown is not so much as mentioned. The amazing nonsense which he writes in summing up Dunbar, we will transcribe, ut ex uno discas omnia : " Dunbar, with never-flagging spirit, attempts every style. . . . His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant ; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing ; they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured." Has M. Jusserand ever read The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The Twa Maryit Wem,en and the Wedo, and the minor poems of Dunbar ? If he has, would he pronounce that these "flowers" are "too flowery" — these "odours" "too fra- 200 ENGLISH LITERATURE grant," or would he feel the absurdity of general- izing on ludicrously insufficient knowledge? His verdicts on the other Scotch poets are marked by the same superficiality, and we regret to add flippancy. To class Henryson among poets whose style is "florid" and whose roses are " splendid but too full-blown " is to show that M. Jusserand knows as little about him as he seems to know about Dunbar. In all Henry- son's poems there are only three short passages which could by any possibility be described as florid. The prose of the fifteenth century fares even worse at his hands. Capgrave is men- tioned only in the bibliography ! Of the in- terest and importance of Pecock, historically and intrinsically, he appears to have no concep- tion ; on the real significance of the Repressor he never even touches, and how indeed could he in the less than one page which is assigned to one of the most remarkable writers in the fifteenth century ? A page suffices for the Pas- ton Letters, and four lines for Malory's Morte d' Arthur ! Now we would ask M. Jusserand, in all serious- ness, what possible end can be served by a book of this kind, except the encouragement of every- thing that is detestable to the real scholar : superficiality, want of thoroughness, and false assumption, and what is more, the public dis- semination of error, and of crude and misleading judgments. Such a work as the present, the 201 ENGLISH LITERATUEE soundness and trustworthiness of which ninety- nine readers in every hundred must necessarily take for granted, can only be justified when it proceeds from one who is a master of his im- mense subject, from one whose generalizations are based on amply sufficient knowledge, whose suppressions and omissions spring neither from carelessness nor from ignorance, but from dis- crimination, and in whose statements and judg- ments implicit reliance can be placed. To none of these qualifications has M. Jusserand the smallest pretension. We have no wish to seem discourteous to M. Jusserand or to say anything which can cause him annoyance, but it is no more than simple duty in any critic with a becoming sense of responsibility to discountenance in every way the production of such books as these. They are not only mischievous in themselves, but they form precedents for books which are more mis- chievous still. We like M. Jusserand's enthu- siasm, but we woixld exhort him to reduce the flatulent dimensions, which his ambition has here so unhappily assumed, to that more tem- pered ambition which gave us the monographs on Piers Ploughman and on the Tudor novelists. 202 DE QUINCET AND HIS FRIENDS ' TO a thoughtful reader there is, perhaps, no sadder spectacle than those sixteen volumes which represent all that remains to us of Thomas De Quincey. What superb powers, what noble and manifold gifts, what capacity for invaluable and imperishable achieve- ments had Nature lavished on this extraordin- ary man ! Metaphysics might for all time have been a debtor to that vigorous, acute, and subtle intellect, at once so speculative and logical, so inquisitive and discriminating. jEs- thetic criticism might have found in him a second Lessing, and literary criticism a superior Sainte-Beuve. For, in addition to all that would have enabled him to excel in abstract thought, he had — and in ample measure — the qualities which make raen consummate critics : rare power of analysis, the nicest perception, sensibility, ' Personal Becollections, Souvenirs, and Anecdotes of Thomas De Quincey and his Friends and Associates. Written and collected by James Hogg. 203 DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS sympathy, good taste, good sense, immense erudition. He might have contributed master- pieces to Theology, to History, to Economic Science. But they know not his name. He has set his seal on nothing but on English style. About a hundred and fifty articles contributed to magazines and encyclopaedias, some of them of a high order of literary raerit, many of them simply worthless, the majority of them contain- ing what is inferior so disproportionately in excess of what is valuable that they may be likened to dustbins, with jewels here and there glittering among the rubbish ; — this is what re- presents him. It is as a master of style, by virtue of what he accomplished as a rhetorician and prose poet only, that he will live. But this, com- paratively scanty as it is, is of pre-eminent, of unique value, and will suffice to secure him a place for ever araong the classics of English prose. He has also another claim, if not to our rever- ence, at least to our curious attention and in- terest, — and that attention and interest he can scarcely fail to excite in every generation, — his autobiographical writings give us a picture, and that with fascinating power, of one of the most extraordinary personalities on record. Indiscriminating admiration is among the most pleasing traits of youth, but in men of mature years it loses its attractiveness. When it is no longer the effervescence of juvenile enthusiasm for which all make allowance, it becomes, hke 204 DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS the levities of boyhood affected in middle life, merely vapid folly. In relation to its object it not only defeats its own ends, but is apt to make recipient and donor alike ridiculous. Nor is this all. By some curious law of association which we cannot pretend to explain, its almost inevit- able ally is dulness, and dulness of a peculiarly wearisome and exasperating kind. During the last few years these peculiarities have become so alarmingly epidemic that it really seems high time to form, on the principle of Mr. Morris's Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monu- ments, a Society for the Preservation of Literary Reputations. When those " of whom to be dis- praised were no small praise " take to eulogy and editing, an unhappy Classic may well look to his true friends. It is nothing less than appalling to behold the mountains of rubbish now gradually accumulating over the work — the real work — of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats ; rubbish of their own, rescued with cruel industry from the oblivion to which they would them- selves have consigned it, rubbish of their com- mentators and editors, dulness and inanity un- utterable. " What, sir," asked an Eton boy of Foote, " was the best thing you ever said ? " " Well," was the reply, " I once saw a chimney- sweep on a high prancing, high-mettled horse. 'There,' said I, 'goes Warburton on Shakespeare." But it is not in the Warburtons, not in the chimney-sweepers, that the mischief lies ; it is in 205 DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS those who may be called the scavengers and sextons of literature, in those who, utterly un- able to discern between what is precious and what is worthless in a man's work, thrust all, without distinction, into prominence, and thus not only enable an author to " write himself down," but, by their indiscriminating eulogies, assist him in his suicide. The subtlest form, indeed, which detraction can assume is over- praise, for a man is thus forced to give the lie to his own reputation. No one, perhaps, has suffered so much from ill- judging admirers as De Quincey. If ever an author needed a judicious adviser, when prepar- ing his works for publication in a permanent form, and a judicious editor, when the time had come for that final edition on which his title to future fame should rest, it was the English opium-eater. But, unhappily, he had no such adviser in his lifetime, and he has had no such editor since. He consequently reprinted much which ought never to have been reprinted at all, and he omitted to reprint some things which would have done honour to him. His besetting faults, even in his vigour, were loquacity and silliness, a habit of " drawing out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argu- ment" — a tendency to peddle and dawdle, as well as to indulge in a sort of pleasantry, so attenu- ated as to border closely on inanity. As he grew older these habits became more confirmed. 206 DE QUINOEY AND HIS FRIENDS His puerility and garrulousness in his later writ- ings are often intolerable. But this was not the worst. In revising some of his earlier papers, and particularly the Confessions, he not only imported into them tiresome irrelevancies and superfluities, but, in emending, ruined the glori- ous passages on which his fame as a rhetorician and prose poet rests ; such has been the fate, among others, of the exquisite description of the powers of opium, — the superb passage beginning, " The town of L . . represented the earth with its sorrows and its graves," ^ and of the dreams in the second part of the Confessions, particularly of the sublime one beginning, " The dream com- menced with a music." * Mr. James Hogg tells us that his design in pubUshing the present volume was that he might "place a stone upon the cairn of the man" who had treated him "with an almost paternal tenderness." We sincerely sympathize with Mr. Hogg's pious intention, but we submit that the truest kindness which he, or any other admirer of De Quincey cotdd do him, would be not to augment but to lighten the cairn which indiscreet admirers are so industriously piling over him. To change the figure, the best service which could be rendered to De Quincey would be to relieve him of hie superfluous baggage, not ' See Works. Black's Edit., Vol. I. p. 212, compared with original Edit., pp. 113-114. 2 Id., p. 272 and original Edit., pp. 177-178. 207 DB QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS to add to it. His fame would stand much higher, if his sixteen volumes were vigorously weeded ; if the sweepings and refuse of his study, so in- judiciously given to the world by Dr. Japp and Mr. Hogg, were given instead to the flames ; and if reminiscents and biographers would only leave him to tell, in his own fashion, his own story, especially as it is one of those stories the interest of which depends purely on the telling. We have already expressed our sympathy with Mr. Hogg's pious intention. It only remains for us to express our regret that Mr. Hogg's piety should have taken the form of the most bare- faced piece of book-making which we ever re- member to have met with. Addison, if we are not mistaken, somewhere describes a man to whom a single volume afforded all the arause- ment and variety of a whole library, for, by the time he had arrived at the middle, he had com- pletely forgotten the beginning, and when he arrived at the end, he had completely forgotten the whole. Mr. Hogg appears to proceed on the assumption that it is pretty much the same with the public and its memory, that its capacity for amusement is permanent, but that its recollec- tion of what has amused it is so treacherous, that repetition will be sure to have all the attraction of novelty. This is, no doubt, unhappily true. But it is a truth which no critic has a right to concede. All that is of interest in this volume is little 208 DE QUmOEY AND HIS FRIENDS more than the literal reproduction, in another shape, of material embodied in a Life of De Quincey, published by Dr. Alexander Japp, under the pseudonym of H. A. Page, in 1877. Its exact composition is as follows. Eliminating the pre- face and the index, the book consists of 359 pages. Of these, seventy consist of a dreary r4chauff4 by Dr. Japp himself of his own Life of De Quincey, and of the additional information contained in his edition of the Posthumous Works. Next comes a series of reminiscences, extracted from Dr. Japp's Life, from Dr. Gar- nett's edition of the Confessions, from the Quar- terly Review, and from other sources all equally accessible. Then Mr. Hogg himself opens fire with Days and Nights with De Quincey. An essay — " On the supposed Scriptural Expression for Eternity " — excellently illustrating De Quin- cey in his senility, is reprinted, with awe-struck admiration, from the American edition of his works. For the purpose, presumably, of adding to the bulk of the book, Moir's ballad, De Quincey's Revenge, is included, though its sole connec- tion with De Quincey is, that it deals with a legend concerning the possible ancestors of a possible branch of his possible family. Then we have one of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson LL.D.'s Outcast Essays, " On the genius of De Quincey," the reason for the hospitable entertainment of the outcast being by no means apparent. Among B.C. 209 O DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS other dreary trifles is a reprint of a Latin theme, one of De Quincey's college exercises. As Mr. Hogg has chosen to reprint and translate this, it would have been as well to print and translate it correctly. " Quae ansibus obstant " should, of course, have been " ausibus," and " oculi per- stringuntur " cannot possibly mean " are spell- bound," but " are dazzled." The republication of these pieces was, we repeat, a great mistake, another lamentable il- lustration of the cruel wrong which officious and ill-judging admirers may inflict on a writer's reputation. Talleyrand once observed that, a wise man would be safer with a foolish than with a clever wife, for a foolish wife could only compromise herself, but a clever wife might comproruise her husband. Substituting ' unambitious ' for ' foolish ' and ' ambitious ' for ' clever,' we are very much inclined to apply the same remark to a great writer and his friends. It requires a Johnson to support a Boswell, and a Groethe to support an Eckermann. 210 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE' IT is a pleasure to turn from the slovenly and perfunctory work, from the plausible charla- tanry and pretentious incompetence which it has so often been our unwelcome duty to expose in these columns, to such a volume as the volume before us. It is books like these which retrieve the honour of English scholarship. A wide range of general knowledge, immense special knowledge, scrupulous accuracy, both in the investigation and presentation of facts, the sound judgment, the tact, the insight which in labjirinths of chaotic traditions and conflicting testimony can discern the clue to probability and truth — these are the qualifications indispensable to a successful biographer of Shakespeare. And these are the qualifications which Mr. Lee pos- sesses, in larger measure than have been pos- sessed by any one who has essayed the task which he has here undertaken. A ranker and more tangled jungle than that presented by the traditions, the apocrypha, the theories, the con- jectures which have gradually accumulated ' A Life of Shakespeare. By Sidney Lee. 211 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE round the memory of Shakespeare since the time of Rowe, could scarcely be conceived. In this jungle some, like Charles Knight, have altogether lost themselves ; others, like Joseph Hunter, have struck out vigorously into wrong tracks, and floundered into quagmires. HaUiwell Phillipps, sure-footed and wary though he was, certainly had not the clue to it. But Mr. Lee, who can plainly say with Comus, — " I know eaoli lane, and every alley green Dingle or bushy dell of this wild wood, And every bosky bourne from side to side, My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood," has thridded it, and taught others to thrid it, as no one else has done. And he will have his reward. He has produced what de- serves to be, and what will probably become, the standard life of our great national poet. Mr. Lee's book is substantially a reproduction of his article on Shakespeare, contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, the high merits of which have long been recognised by scholars ; and he has certainly done well to make that article popularly accessible by re- printing it in a separate form. But the present volume is not a mere reproduction of his con- tribution to the Dictionary ; it is much more. He has here filled out what he could there sketch only in outline ; what he could there state only as results and conclusions, he here illustrates and justifies by corroboration and 212 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE proof. He has, moreover, both in the text and in the appendices, brought together a great mass of interesting and pertinent collateral matter which the scope of the Dictionary neces- sarily precluded. More than a century ago George Steevens wrote : " All that can be known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where he com- menced actor, wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried there." And, if we set aside probable inferences, this is all we do know of any importance about his life. His pedigree cannot certainly be traced beyond his father. Nothing is known of the place of his education — that he was educated at the Stratford Grammar School is pure assump- tion. His life between his birth and the pub- lication of Venus and Adonis in 1593, is an absolute blank. It is at least doubtful whether the supposed allusion to him in Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, and in Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream have any reference to him at all ; it is still more doubtful whether the William Shake- speare of Adrian Quiney's letter, or of the Rogers and Addenbroke summonses, or the William Shakespeare who was assessed for property in St. Helens, Bishopsgate, was the poet. We know practically nothing of his life in London, or of the date of his arrival in London ; we are 213 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE ignorant of the date of his return to Stratford, of his happiness or unhappiness in married Hfe, of his habits, of his last days, of the cause of his death. Not a sentence that fell from his lips has been authentically recorded. At least one- half of the alleged facts of his biography is as purely apocryphal as the life of Homer attri- buted to Herodotus. But probability, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life, and on the basis of probability may be raised, it must be owned, a fairly satis- factory biography. Mr. Lee has not been able to contribute any new facts to Shakespeare's life, which is certainly not his fault ; but he has given us a recapitulation, as lucid as it is exhaustive, of all that the industry of successive generations of memorialists from Ben Jonson to Halliwell Phillipps has succeeded in accumu- lating, and he has been as judicious in what he has rejected as in what he has adopted. From the curse of the typical Shakespearian biographer — we mean the statement of mere in- ference and hypothesis as fact — he is absolutely free. He has done excellent service in giving, if not finishing, at least swashing blows to the monstrous fictions of the theorists on the sonnets, particularly to the Fitton-Pembroke mare's nest, fictions which have been gradually generating a Shakespeare, as purely apocryphal as the Roland of the song or the ApoUonius of Philostratus. Mr. Lee's most remarkable contribution to 214 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE speculative Shakespearian criticism, in which, we are glad to say, he does not often indulge, is his contention that the W. H. of the dedication to the sonnets was William Hall, a small pirat- ical stationer. It is never wise to speak posi- tively on what must necessarily be, till certain evidence is obtainable, a matter of speculation. But we are very much inclined to think that Mr. Lee's contention has at least something in its favour. Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus : "To the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adven- turer in setting forth. T. T." It has generally been assumed that the "W. H." is the youth who is the hero of the first group of sonnets, and the poet's friend, and he has commonly been identi- fied either with William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, or with Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The difficulties in the way of either hypothesis — and on each hypothesis not Babels merely, but cities of Babels have been raised — are to an unprejudiced mind insur- mountable. Mr. Lee maintains with plausible ingenuity, but not, we think, conclusively, that there is no proof that the youth of the sonnets was named " Will " at all. His analysis of the " Will " sonnets is a masterpiece of subtle in- genuity, and well deserves careful attention. 215 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE He then proceeds to adopt the theory that the word " begetter " is not to be taken in the sense of " inspirer," but simply as " procurer " or " obtainer " of the sonnets for T. T., i.e., the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. In other words, that Thorpe dedicated the sonnets to W. H., in return for W. H. having piratically obtained them for him. This is at least doubtful. In the first place it may reasonably be questioned whether " begetter" could have the meaning which is here assigned to it; the passages quoted from Hamlet (" acquire and beget a temperance ") and frora Dekker's Satiro-mastix, " I have some cousins german at Court shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels," are any- thing but conclusive. Still, Thorpe, who is by no means remarkable for the purity of his English, may have used it in the sense which Mr. Lee's theory requires. Shakespeare's sonnets, as is well known, were circulating among his friends in manu- script, and Mr. Lee has discovered that one William Hall was well known as an Autolycus among publishers, and had already edited, under the initials W. H., a collection of poems left by the Jesuit poet, Southwell — in other words had already done for the publisher, George Eld, what it is assumed that he now did for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Lee's theory is, it must be admitted, plausible, and few would hesitate to pronounce it far more probable than the theory which 216 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE would identify the enigmatical initials with the names of Pembroke or Southampton. The chapters dealing with the sonnets are, in our opinion the most valuable contribution which has ever been made to this iraportant province of Shakespearian study, and it may be said of Mr. Lee, as Porson said of Bentley, that we may learn more from him when he is wrong than from many others when they are right. His contention is, and it is supported with exhaus- tive erudition, that these poems are, in the main, a concession to the fashion, then so much in vogue, of sonnet writing ; that their themes are the conventional themes treated in those compo- sitions ; that some of them were dedicated to Southampton, that some may be autobiogra- phical, but that they are wholly raiscellaneous, and tell no consecutive story, as so many critics have erroneously assumed. We cannot accept all Mr. Lee's theories and conclusions, but one thing is certain, that they are supported with infinitely more skill and learning than any other theories which have been broached on this hope- lessly baffling problem. We wUl conclude by noticing what seem to us slight blemishes in this admirable work. There is nothing to warrant the assertion on p. 158 that most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594, which is to cut the knot of a most difficult question. Indeed, with respect to the whole question of the sonnets, Mr. Lee is, we venture 217 LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE to submit, a little too dogmatic. It is a question which no one can settle as positively as Mr. Lee seems to settle it. There is surely no good, or even plausible reason for doubting the authenticity of Titus Andronicus, whatever innumerable Shake- spearian critics may say, external and internal evidence alike being almost conclusive for its genuineness. There is nothing to warrant the supposition that Shakespeare was on bad terms with his wife. The famous bequest in his Will was probably a delicate compliment, and we are surprised that Mr. Lee should not have noticed this. Among the testimonies to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, Mr. Lee should have recorded that of Archbishop Sharp, who, according to Speaker Onslow, used to say " that the Bible and Shakespeare had made him Arch- bishop of York." Mr. Lee must also forgive us for adding that, in this work at least, sesthetic criticism is not his strong point, and he woidd have done well to keep it within even narrower bounds than he has done. Many of those who would be the first to admire his erudition and the other scholarly quahties which are so conspicuous in every chapter of his book, will, we fear, take exception to much of his criticism, especially in relation to the sonnets. It is too positive ; it is unsympa- thetic ; it is too mechanical. But our debt to Mr. Lee is so great, that we feel almost ashamed to make any deductions in our tribute of gratitude. 218 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS^ THERE goes a story that an ingenuous youth, who had the privilege of an introduction to Lord Beaconsfield, resolved to make the best of the occasion, by extracting, if possible, from that astute political sage the secret of success in life. It might take the form, he thought, of a little practical advice. For that advice, explaining the object with which it was asked, he accord- ingly applied. "Yes," said Lord Beaconsfield, " I think I can give you some advice which may possibly be of use to you. Never trouble your- self about The Man in the Iron Mask, and never get into a discussion about the authorship of the Letters of Junius." In all seriousness we think it is high time that the " closure " should be * The Mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets : an attempted Elucidation. By Cuming Walters. Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearian Plays and Poems. By Jesse Johnson. Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered and in part Re-arranged, with Introductory Chapters, Notes and a Reprint of the Original 1609 Edition. By Samuel Butler. 219 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS applied to a debate on another "mystery "of which every one must be tired to death, except perhaps those who contribute to it. If some pro- gress could be made towards the solution of the Mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets, if there was the faintest indication of any dawn on the dark- ness, even the wearied reviewer would be patient. But the thing remains exactly where it was, before this appalling literary epidemic set in. During the last three or four years scarcely a month has passed without its " monograph," many of these treatises, mere replicas of their predecessors, differing only in degrees of stupidity and uselessness. Mr. Cuming Walters' volume, sensible enough and intelligent, we quite con- cede, simply thrashes the straw. It professes to be an original contribution to the question. There is not a view or theory in it, which is not now a platitude to every one who has had the patience to follow this controversy. It analyses the Sonnets ; they have been analysed hundreds of times. It asks who was W. H. ; it answers the question as it has been answered usque ad nauseam. It discusses the dark lady, and lands us in the same shifting quagmire of opinion in which Mr. Tyler and his coadjutors and opponents have been floundering for the last four years. It assumes, it rejects, it questions, it suggests, what has been assumed, rejected, questioned, and suggested over and over again. Indeed, it may now be said with literal truth that, unless 220 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS some fresh discovery is made, nothing new, whether in the way of absurdity or sense, can be advanced on this subject. But books are multiplied with such rapidity and in such pro- digious numbers in these days, that they thrive, like cannibals, on one another. The last comer is simply its forgotten predecessor in disguise. But platitude is the very last charge that can be brought against Mr. Jesse Johnson's contribu- tion to the curiosities of Shakespearian criticism. The theory advanced here is, that Shakespeare never wrote the Sonnets at all, that he was quite unequal to their composition, that the author of them "was probably fifty, perhaps sixty, and that he was besides a man of genius, which Shakespeare certainly was not. I would not," says Mr. Jesse Johnson, " deny to Shakespeare great talent. His success in and with theatres certainly forbids us to do so. That he had a bent or a talent for rhyming or for poetry, an early and persistent tradition and the inscrip- tion over his grave indicate. And otherwise there could hardly have been attributed to him so many plays, besides those written by the author of the Sonnets." Shakespeare may have been equal to trifles like Hamlet or Lear — for Mr. Jesse Johnson would be the last to dispute the claim made for Shakespeare as a hard- working playwright clearing his twenty-five thousand dollars a year (Mr. Jesse Johnson is calculating his income according to the present 221 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS time) — but "to Shakespeare working as an actor, adapter or perhaps author came a very great poet, one who outclassed all the writers of that day, and it is the poetry of that great unknown which, flowing into Shakespeare's work, comprises all or nearly all of it which the world treasures or cares to remember." If we told Mr. Jesse Johnson, and all who resemble Mr. Jesse Johnson, the truth about their productions, we are quite certain of one thing — but the one thing of which we are certain it would, perhaps, be good taste in us to leave unsaid. Of a very different order is Mr. Samuel Butler's Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered. This is the work of a scholar, but of a scholar mounted on a hobby-horse of unusually vigorous mettle. Mr. Butler begins with a tremendous onslaught on the theories of the Southampton- ites, the Herbertists and the anti-autobiographical party ; and in this part of his work he has certainly much to say which is both pertinent and plaus- ible, nay, in our opinion, convincing. But he is less successful in construction than in demolition. His own contention is, that the Sonnets are undoubtedly autobiographical, and very deroga- tory to Shakespeare's moral character. He is satisfied that " Mr. W. H. " was the youth who inspired them, not the youth who simply collected, or procured them, and gave them to Thorpe, but that this youth was neither the Earl of Southampton nor the Earl of Pembroke, 222 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS nor, indeed, any one of superior social rank to the poet, though this has always been assumed. Adopting the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone that the key to the youth's name is to be found in the seventh line of the twentieth sonnet, — "A man in hew all Hewes in his controlling." and deducing, with them, from Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi. and cxliii. that the youth's Christian name was William, Mr. Butler believes, as they did, that the youth's name was William Hughes, or Hewes ; and Mr. Butler is inclined to identify him, though he speaks, of course, by no means confidently, with a William Hughes, who served as steward in the Vanguard, Swiftsure and Dreadnought, and who died in March, 1636-7. Mr. Butler supports his theories with hypotheses which an impartial judge of evidence will find it difficult to concede. In the face of Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv. the contention that the youth was not in a superior social station to the poet cannot be maintained with any con- fidence. There are still graver difficulties in the way of supposing that the Sonnets were written between January, 1585-6 and December, 1588. That they could be the work of a young man between his twenty -first and his twenty -fourth year, and have preceded by some four years the composition of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of I/acrece, is simply incredible ; but it is a question which cannot be argued, for we have 223 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS nothing but mere hypothesis to go upon. Mr. Butler's arrangement and interpretation of the Sonnets are, moreover, purely fanciful. When Mr. Butler would have us believe that some of the Sonnets in the second group, from cxxvii. to clii., are addressed to and concern not the woman, but the youth, he asks us to accept a theory which is not only revolting, but which sets all probability at defiance. Similarly absurd, he must forgive us for saying, is his grotesquely repulsive interpretation of Sonnet xxxiv. Nor is there anything to justify the interpretation placed on Sonnets xxxiii. and xxxiv. or the col- location of cxxi. All that can be said for Mr. Butler's exceedingly ingeniovis and admirably argued theory is, that it supports a view of the question which, if it admits of no positive con- futation, produces no conviction. No theory, based on an arbitrary arrangement of these poems and on positive deductions drawn, or rather strained, from most ambiguous evidence and from pure hypotheses, can possibly be satis- factory. The problem presented in these Sonnets is undoubtedly the most fascinating problem in all literature, and it is as exasperating as it is fascinating. It appears to be so simple, it seems constantly to be on the verge of its solution, and yet the moment we get beyond a certain point in inquiry, the more complex its apparent simplicity is discovered to be, the more 224 SHAKESPEAEE'S SONNETS hopeless all prospect of explaining the enigma. Take the difficulty of assuming, what seems to be obvious, that they are autobiographical. Here we have the poet, and that poet Shake- speare, admitting the world into the innermost secrets of his life, taking his contemporaries, without the least reserve, into his confidence, inviting and assisting them to the study of his own morbid anatomy, and, in a word, stripping himself bare with all the shameless abandon of Jean Jacques and of Casanova. Everything that we know of Shakespeare seeras to dis- countenance the probability of his having any such intention. No anecdote, with the smallest pretence to authenticity, couples his name with scandal. The theory which identifies him with the W. S. of WiUobie's Avisa has no real basis to rest on, and without corroboration is absolutely inadmissible as evidence. Whatever Shakespeare's private life may have been, it is quite clear that he carefully regarded the decencies, and would have been the last man in the world to pose publicly in the character pre- sented to us in the Sonnets. If the poems are autobiographical, we can only conclude that they were published without his consent, and even to his great annoyance. This may cer- tainly have been the case, and is indeed often assumed to have been so. But even then it is, to say the least, curious, that there should have been no tradition about the extraordinary B.O. 225 P SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS story which they tell, especially considering the distinction of the dramatis personce. Assuming that the youth, who is their hero, was a real person, he must, judging from Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv., have been conspicuous in the society of that time ; assuming the rival poet to be a real person, he must have been equally con- spicuous in another sphere, while Shakespeare himself, at the time the Sonnets were published, was the most distinguished poet and playwright in London. It is, therefore, extraordinary that all traces of an affair in which persons of so much eminence were involved, and which would have furnished scandal-mongers with the topics in which such gossips most delight, should have entirely disappeared. We must either conclude that posterity has been very unfortunate in the loss of records which would have thrown light on the matter, or that Shakespeare's contem- poraries knew nothing of the facts, and con- tented themselves with the poetry ; or, lastly, that what we may call the fable of the Sonnets, the drama in which W. H., " the dark lady," and the rival poet play their parts, is as fictitious as the plot of The Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Tempest. It is not our intention to support any of the numerous theories which pretend to give us the key to these Sonnets, still less to propose any new one, but simply to show that the enigma presented by them is as insoluble as ever, and 226 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS that all attempts to throw light on it have served to effect nothing more than to make darkness visible and confusion worse confounded. Let us briefly review the facts. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe, a well-known Elizabethan bookseller, published a small quarto volume, entitled Shake- speare's Sonnets, having apparently not obtained them from the poet himself, and to this volume was prefixed the following dedication : — " To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." Here begins and ends all that is certainly known about W. H. and his relation to these poems. No one knows who he was ; no one knows what is exactly meant by the word " begetter," whether it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, whether that is to say W. H. is the youth celebrated in the Sonnets — "the master-mistress" of the poet's passion, or whether it simply means the person who got or procured the poems for Thorpe, — in which case the identification of the initials is of no consequence, unless we are to suppose that the youth who inspired them presented them to Thorpe. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his very able paper in the Fortnightly Review for February, 1898, and in his Life of Shakespeare, argues that there is no proof that the youth of the Sonnets was named " WUl," though this has always been assumed to be the case. 227 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS The evidence on which the point must be argued will be found in the puns on " Will " in Sonnets cxxxiv.-vi. and cxliii. It seems to us, we must own, that the balance o£ proba- bility, though not certainly in favour of the affirmative, decidedly inclines towards it. Granting then, — for it is, after aU, only an hypothesis, — that the initials W. H. are those of the youth celebrated in the Sonnets, to whom are they to be assigned ? The youth, whoever he was, is represented as being in a social position superior to that of the poet ; he has apparently rank and title ; he has wealth ; he is young and eminently handsome, his beauty being of a delicate, effeminate cast ; he is highly cultivated and accomplished ; he is on terms of the closest intimacy with the poet, by whom he is passion- ately beloved ; he lives a free, loose life, and he intrigues with his friend's mistress. Passing by all preposterous theories about William Harte, William Hughes, William Him- self and the like, we come to the two names which seem worth serious consideration, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesly, third Earl of Southampton. The Pembroke theory, with Mr. Thomas Tyler's corollary identifying the " dark lady " with Mary Fitton, has been adopted by Dr. Brandes in his work on Shakespeare just published. But the difficulties in the way of accepting it are insuperable. They have been admirably dis- 228 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS cussed by Mr. Sidney Lee in the article to which we have referred. In the first place, while Shakespeare must have been on terms of more than brotherly intimacy with the youth of the Sonnets, there is no evidence at all that he had ever been in any other relation with the Earl than in the ordinary one of servant and patron. The words of Heminge and Condell, in the dedi- cation of the first folio to Pembroke and his brother, merely state that they had both of them " prosequted " him with favour ; in other words, been to him what they had been to many other dramatists and men of letters ; and that is the only evidence of any connection between Shakespeare and Pembroke. Tradition was certainly silent about any relations between them, for Aubrey, as Mr. Lee has pointed out, though he has collected much information about both, says nothing about their acquaintance- ship, though he mentions Pembroke's connec- tion with Massinger, and Southampton's with Shakespeare. But Thorpe's dedication is con- clusive against Pembroke. In 1609, Pembroke, who had succeeded to the title on the death of his father in January, 1601, was Lord Chamber- lain, a Knight of the Garter, and one of the most distinguished noblemen in England. Is it credible that Thorpe would address him as Mr. W. H., more especially as in the other works which he inscribed to him, — and he inscribed several, — he is careful to give him all 229 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS his titles, and to address him with the most fulsome servility? Again, Pembroke, as Mr. Lee points out, was never a " Mister " at all. As the eldest son of an earl, he was designated by courtesy Lord Herbert, and as Lord Herbert he is always spoken of in contemporary records. The appellation " Mr. " was not, as Mr. Lee observes, used loosely, as it is now, and could never have been applied to any nobleman, whether holding his title by right or by courtesy. Whatever allowance may be made for a poet's passion and fancy, some weight must be attached to the insistence made in the Sonnets on the youth's delicate and effeminate beauty. It is true that we have no portraits of Pembroke before he arrived at middle age, but those portraits justify us in concluding that he could never, at any time, have been distin- guished by beauty of the type indicated in the poems. Against all this the advocates of the Pembroke theory have nothing to place but conjectures, a series of insignificant coincidences and the assumption that the woman in the Sonnets is to be identified with the woman who bore Herbert a child, Mary Fitton. The publication of Sonnet xliv. by Jaggard, in 1599, shows that the intrigue between the youth and the dark lady, which is the central event of the Sonnets, was already, and had probably been for some time, in fuU career, while there is no evidence that Pem- 230 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS broke was involved with Mary Fitton before the summer of 1600. But what finally disposes of this theory is the testimony afforded by Lady Newdigate-Newdigate's recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room,, Indispens- able requisites in the lady of the Sonnets are, that she should be dark, a "black beauty" with " eyes raven black," with hair which resembles " black wires," and that she should be a married woman ; but the portraits — and there are two of them — of Mary Fitton, show that she had a fair complexion, with brown hair and grey eyes; and she remained unmarried, until long after her connection with Pembroke had ceased. The theory which identifies W. H, with the Earl of Southampton is slightly more plausible, but the difficulties in the way of accepting it are, in truth, equally insuperable. This theory has at least one great point in its favour. Shake- speare was acquainted, and it may be inferred intimately acquainted, with Southampton, as the dedications of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucreee indicate. Of his affection and respect for this nobleman he has left an expres- sion almost as remarkable as the language of the sonnets. " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end. . . . What I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours : being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater." This bears a singularly close resemblance to Sonnet xxvi., — 231 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassage To witness duty, not to show my wit, Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem hare, in wanting words to show it." And there is much in the Sonnets which can be made to coincide with what we know of South- ampton. But, as we push inquiry, difficulties of all kinds begin to swarm in on us. The first is, as in the case of Pembroke, with the dedication. To say nothing of the fact that " W. H." is not " H. W." — the possibility of the appellation of "Mr." being applied to one who had been an Earl since 1581, and who had twice been ad- dressed in dedications by his full titles, and that by Shakespeare himself, is a wholly inadmissible hypothesis. To argue that this was merely " a blind," is simply to beg the question. If the Sonnets were ' addressed to Southampton, they must have been written between 1593 and 1598. In 1593 Southampton was in his twenty-first year, in 1598 in his twenty-sixth; Shakespeare, respectively, in his thirty-first and thirty-fifth year. Now, what is especially emphasized in the sonnets is the youthfulness of the young man to whom they are dedicated, and the advanced age of the poet. In Sonnet cviii. the youth is addressed as " a sweet boy," in cxxvi. as " a lovely boy," in liv. as "a beauteous and lovely youth " ; in xcv. his " budding name " is referred 232 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS to, while the poet speaks of himself as " old," as " beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity," as being " with Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn." And so, as has been miore than once pointed out, we have this anomaly — a man of thirty-four describing himself as a thing of "tanned antiquity" in writing to " a sweet and lovely boy " of twenty-five. No one could have been less like the effeminate youth of the Son- nets than Southampton. All we know about him, including his portraits, indicates that he was eminently masculine and manly. Again, it is matter of history that he greatly distin- guished himseK on the Azores expedition in 1597, acquitting himself with so much gallantry that, during the voyage, he was knighted by Essex. To this expedition, which must have involved one of those absences of which we hear so much in the Sonnets, to this exploit and this honour, which afforded so much opportunity for peculiarly acceptable compliment, Shakespeare makes no reference at all. There is nothing to indicate that the youth of the Sonnets had gained any military or political distinction, had taken any part in public life, or had ever been absent from England. To assume with Mr. Lee that the Sonnets were written in or before 1594, and therefore before Southampton had become distinguished, is to involve ourselves in inextric- able difficulties. Even Mr. Lee admits that Sonnet cvii. must have reference to the death 233 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS of Elizabeth in 1603. With regard to the supposed references to Southampton's relations with Elizabeth Vernon, no certain, or, to speak more accurately, no even plausible inferences can be drawn in any particular : all that they can be reduced to are degrees of improbability. If, again, we accept the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone, supported by Mr. Butler, and suppose that W. H. was some obscure person, we are proceeding on mere hypothesis, and a hypothesis seriously shaken by the plain meaning expressed in Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii., and cxxiv. The enigma of these Sonnets is, we repeat, as insoluble now as it was when inquiry was first directed to them. Whether they are to be re- garded as autobiographical, as dramatic studies, as a mixture of both, as a collection of mis- cellaneous poems, as written to order for others, as mere exercises in the sonnet-cycle, or as aU of these things, is alike uncertain. Our know- ledge of the time of their composition begins and ends with the facts, that some of them were, presumably, in circulation in or before 1598, that two of them had certainly been com- posed in or before 1599, and that all of them had been written by 1609. The rest is mere conjecture ; and on mere conjecture and mere hypothesis is based every attempt to solve their mystery. If certainty about them can ever be arrived at, it can only be attained by evidence of which, as yet, we have not even an 234 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS inkling. The probability is, that it was Shake- speare's intention, or rather Thorpe's intention, to baffle curiosity, and, except in the judgment of fanatics, he has certainly succeeded in doing so. For our own part we are very much inclined to suspect, that they owed their origin to the fashion of composing sonnet-cycles, that those cycles suggested their themes and gave them the ply ; that the beautiful youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady are pure fictions of the imagination ; and that these poems are autobio- graphical only in the sense in which Venus and Adonis, the Rape of JJucrece, Romeo and Juliet and Othello are autobiographical. 235 LANDSCAPE IN POETRY IT would be scarcely possible for a critic of Mr. Palgrave's taste and learning to produce a treatise on any aspect of poetry, which would not be full of interest and instruction, and the present volume is a contribution, and in some respects a memorable contribution, to a par- ticularly attractive subject of critical inquiry. Its purpose is to trace the history of descriptive poetry in its relation, that is to say, to natural objects and more particularly to landscape, by illustrating its characteristics at different periods, and among different nations. Beginning with the Homeric poems, Mr. Palgrave reviews suc- cessively the " landscape " of the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews, the mediaeval Italians, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and of our own poets, from the predecessors of Chaucer to Lord Tennyson. That a work, covering an area so immense, should be far less satisfactory in some portions than in others is no more than what ' Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson. By Francis T. Palgrave. 236 LANDSCAPE IN POETRY might be expected, and Mr. Palgrave would probably be himself the first to admiit that, ex- cept when he is dealing with the classical poetry of Hellas, of ancient and mediaeval Italy, and of our own country, his treatise has no pretension to adequacy. Even within these bounds there is much which is irrelevant, and much which is surprisingly defective. Where, as in a subject like this, the material at the author's disposal is necessarily so superabundant, surely the utmost care should have been taken both to keep within the limits of the theme proposed, and to select the most pertinent and typical illustrations. But when Mr. Palgrave illustrates " Homeric landscape " by the simile describing the heifers frisking about the drove of cows in the fold- yard, and the " Sophoclean landscape " by the simile of the blast-impelled wave roUing up the shingle, he lays himself open to the imputation of drawing at random on his commonplace book. Indeed, the pleasure with which lovers of classical poetry will read this book cannot fail to be mingled with the liveliest surprise and disappointment. Take the Homeric poems. If a reader, tolerably well versed in the Iliad and Odyssey, were asked for illustrations of the power with which natural phenomena are de- scribed, to what would he turn ? Certainly not to Mr. Palgrave's meagre and trivial examples, three of which alone have any title to perti- nence. He would turn to the winter landscape 237 LANDSCAPE IN POETRY in Iliad, xii. 278-286, to the lifting of the cloud from the landscape in Iliad, xvi. 296 : — ojy 8' ot' a<^' v^rjKrjs Kopvcprjs opeos fieyaKoio Kivr)(Tj) TTVKivrjV ve<^fKr)v (rTeponrjyfpfTa Zeis, ex t' ((pavev Tracrai cTKOTnai Kal npaioves oKpot Kal vdnm, ovpavoBev 8' rap' virfppayrj aarreros aWrip, " As when Zeus, the gatherer of the lightning, moves a thick cloud from the high head of some mighty mountain, and all the cliffs and the jutting crags and the dells start into light, and the immeasurable heaven breaks open to its highest " ; to the descent of the wind on the sea, lb. xi. 305-308 :— us SnoTc Ze(f)vpos vecfxa (TTv^iKl^ji dpycaTao Ndroio, ^adelrj Xa/XaTTt tvittcov' rTKibvaTm e^ dvep.oio'iroKvTrXdyKToto icoijff. ''As when the west wind buffets the cloudlets of the brightening south wind, lashing them with furious squall, and the big wave swells up and rolls along, and the spray is scattered on high by the blast of the careering gale " ; or to the pictures of the billow-buffeted headland, and the wave bursting on the ship in Iliad, xv. 618-628 ; or to the storm-cloud coming over the sea in Iliad, iv. 277 ; or to the descent of the wind on the standing corn, Hiad, ii. 147. He would point, above all, to the description of Calypso's grotto, in Odyssey, v. 63-74; to that of the harbour of Phorcys, in Odyssey, xiii. 97-112 ; to the fountain in the grove, xvii. 205-211. Mr. Palgrave comments justly on Homer's minute observation of nature ; but he 238 LANDSCAPE IN POETRY only gives one illustration, where it is noticed in Odyssey, vi. 94, that the sea, in beating on the coast, " washed the pebbles clean." He might have added with propriety many others : as the " earth blackening behind the plough," in Iliad, xviii. 548 ; the bats in the cave, Odyssey, xxiv. 5-8 ; the birds escaping from the vultures, Iliad, xxii. 304, 305 ; the wasps " wriggling as far as the middle," yi tI (^ritu KaKarepov aWo 6aKav toiovtuv iraOrjfjidrcov KadapaLV, "through pity and fear effecting the pur- gation of these emotions," the French and English critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, ignoring the words t&v Toiovrtov, have totally misinterpreted the passage, and given it a meaning which was not only not intended by Aristotle, but which has falsified his whole theory of the scope and functions of tragedy. 263 ANCIENT GREEK AND An unsound text, the insertion of aXKd before the clause, sent Lessing on a wrong track. From the misinterpretation of another passage in the treatise (V. 4) has been deduced the famous doctrine of the Unities. The mistranslation of aTTovSalot in the definition of Tragedy, and of the same word in the comparison between Poetry and History, has led to misconceptions on other points. The scholars who did most in England to place the study of this treatise on a sound footing were Twining and Tyrwhitt. In the present century it has received exhaustive illustration from Saint-Hilaire, Stahr, Susemihl, Vahlen, Teichmiiller, Ueberweg, Reinkens, Jacob Bernays, and others ; while such works as E. Miiller's Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst hei den Alien have thrown general light on the question of Greek sesthetics. That Professor Butcher has not been able to advance anything new in these essays is very creditable to him, for the simple reason that, as all that is worth saying has been said, his sole resource, had he attempted to be original, would have been paradox and sophistry. With regard to the question of the Katharsis, it will probably be, for all time, a case of " quot homines tot sententise " ; and we have certainly no intention of accompanying Professor Butcher into this labyrinth. We entirely agree with him and Bernays that the passage in the Politics (V. viii. 7) settles conclusively at least one part of the meaning, but we differ from Bernays, 264 MODERN LIFE in contending that the " lustratio " is included, and from Professor Butcher, in contending that the " lustratio " is not effected merely by the re- lief. Professor Butcher seems here indeed to be a little confused, or at all events confusing. He first explains "katharsis " as "a purging away of the emotions of pity and fear," and then explains it as "a purifying of them " ; but it is neither easy to understand how " purging away " is " purifying," nor why we should " purify " what we " purge away." Surely it is better — but we speak with all submission — to take the word in two different meanings, the one signifying the imraediate effect of tragedy in its direct appeal to the passions referred to, the other not to its immediate, but to its ulterior and total effect in educating the passions thus ex- cited. Professor Butcher, who appears to belong to the Pater School, dwells with great complacency on the fact that Aristotle "attempted to sepa- rate the function of assthetics from that of morals," that "he made the end of art reside in a pleasurable emotion," that he says "nothing of any moral aim in poetry," and that though he often takes exception to Euripides as an artist, " he attaches no blame to him for the immoral tendency in some of his dramas," so severely censured by Aristophanes. If Professor Butcher implies, as he seems to imply by this, that Aristotle would lend any countenance to the 265 ANCIENT GREEK AND modern art -for -art's -sake doctrine, and pro- ceeded on the assumption that there was no necessary connection between aesthetics and morals, he does Aristotle very great injustice, and is refuted by the Poetics themselves. In the fifth chapter Aristotle lays stress on the fact that tragedy is, like epic, a representation of " superior or morally good characters " {fillMr]aii airovhaiwv) — that the characters are to be good (;^/37?orTo). In the twenty-fifth chapter he says that nothing can excuse the exhibition of moral depravity {M'OX^VP^"'), unless it be one of the things implicit in the plot ; and that among the most serious objections which can be brought against a drama is that it is likely to do moral harm (ySXoySe/sa). In the thirteenth chapter he shows, — and on moral grounds, — why the protagonist in a tragedy should not be a perfectly good man or a perfectly bad man. Indeed, the very definition of tragedy refutes Professor Butcher's statement. It may be said, no doubt, that Aristotle maintains that the end of poetry is pleasure, but it must be " the proper pleasure," and in the proper pleasure moral satisfaction is implied.^ It is only by a quibble that Professor Butcher's theory can be supported, and it is a pity to quibble on subjects which ' So lie says, Poet., xxvi., of epic and tragedy, that each ought not to produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it {Su yip oi t%v TvxoOpoavvr}<; aTrri-)(riiJi,a, " the echo of a great soul " ; it has, the Treatise tells us, five char- acteristics — richness and grandeur of conception (to Trept rh, ^ ■ — who does not recognise Matthew Arnold's " natural magic " ? Flowers he loved, as Shakespeare loved them. What tenderness there is in the image of the love that perished — Prati nitimi flos, praetereunte postquam Taotus aratro est, (Xi: 19-21.) — in the beautiful simile, so often imitated in 338 CATULLUS AND LESBIA every language in Europe, where the unmarried maiden is compared to the uncropped flower, Ixii., 39-45 ; or where in the Alba partheuice, Luteumve papaver, (Ixi. 194-5.) he sees the symbol of maidenhood ; or where Ariadne is compared to the myrtles on the banks of the Eurotas, and to the " flowers of diverse hues which the spring breezes evoke " ; and, again, the exquisite simile picturing the hus- band's love binding fast the bride's thoughts, as a tree is entwined in the clinging clasp of the gadding ivy — Mentem amore revinciens, TJt tenax liedera hue et hue Arborem implicat errans. . >' ' Then we have the garland of Priapus with its felicitous epithets (xix., xx.). It may be said of Catullus as Shelley said of his Alastor — Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart their choicest impulses. What rapture inspires and informs the lines to his yacht, and to Sirmio, as well as the Jam ver egelidos refert tepores ! As the author of the Attis Catullus stands alone among poets. There was, so far as we know, nothing hke it before, and there has been 339 CATULLUS AND LESBIA nothing like it since. If it be a study from the Greek, as it is generally supposed to be, it is very difficult to conjecture at what period its original could have been produced. There is nothing at all resembling it which has come down from the lyric period ; its theme is not one which would have been likely to attract the Attic poets. If its model was the work of some Alexandrian, we can only say that such a poem must have been an even greater anomaly in that literature than Smart's Song to David is to our own literature, in the eighteenth century. It may, of course, be urged that it is equally anomalous in Latin poetry, and that, if resolved into its elements, it has much more affinity with what may be traced to Greek than to Roman sources. In its com- pound epithets, and more particularly in the singular use of " foro," so plainly substituted for the Greek ayopd and its associations, it certainly reads like a translation from the Greek ; and yet, in the total impression made by it, the poem has not the air of a translation, but of an original, and of an original struck out, in in- spiration, at white heat. Only by an extraordinary effort of imaginative sympathy are we now able to realize to ourselves the tragedy of the Attis, while its rushing galli- ambics whirl us through the panorama of its swift- succeeding pictures. But home to every heart must come the poems which Catullus dedicates to the memory of his brother, and the poem in 340 CATULLUS AND LESBIA which he tries to soothe Calvus for the death of Quintilia. Multas per gentes, et multa per aequora vectua Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, TJt te postremo donarem munere mortis, Et mutum nequidquam alloquerer cinerem : Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum : Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi ! Nunc tamen interea prisco quae more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe, fraterno multum manantia fletu: , , Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. ' ' "Many are the peoples, many the seas I have passed through to be here, dear brother, at this, thine untimely grave, that I might pay thee death's last tribute, and greet, — how vainly, — the dust that has no response. For well I know Fortune hath bereft me of thy living self — Ah ! hapless brother, cruelly torn from me ! Yet here, see, be the offerings which, from of old, the custom of our fathers hath handed down as a sad oblation to the grave— take them — they are streaming with a brother's tears. And now — for evermore — brother, hail and farewell ! " Could pathos go further? How exquisite, too, is the following : — Si quidquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris Aocidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest, Quum desiderio veteres renovamus amores, Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias : Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est Quintilise, quantum gaudet amore tuo. ' X '^ V / . ' " If the silent dead can feel any pleasure, or solace from our sorrow, Calvus, when, in wistful regret, we recall past loves, and weep for the friendships severed long ago, then be sure that Quintilia's grief for her early death is not so great as the joy she feels in knowing your love for her." 341 CATULLUS AND LESBIA Shakespeare merely unfolded what was included here, when he wrote those haunting lines : — When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long-since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight. Never, too, has any poet given such pathetic expression to a sorrow, which to the young is even harder to bear than the loss inflicted by death, the perfidy and treachery of friends. The verses to Alphenus (xxx.), to the anonymous friend in lxviii.,and the epigram to Rufus(lxxvii.), are indescribably touching. What infinite sad- ness there is in : — Si tu oblitus es, at Dii meminerunt, meminit Fides, Quae te ut pseniteat postmodo facti faciet tui. ^ '''■ What passion of grief in : — Heu, heu, nostrse crudele venenum Vitse, heu, heu, nostrse pestis amioitise ! 7 7 But nothing that Catullus has left us equals in fascinating interest, or exceeds in charm, the poems inspired by the woman who was at once the bliss and the curse of his life — Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia. Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam ' ' ' Plusquam se, atque sues amavit omnes. / > ' ' i 342 CATULLUS AND LESBIA "Whether she is to be identified with the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, and the wife of Metellus Geler, seems to us, in spite of the arguments of Schwabe^, Munro, Ellis, and Sellar, extremely- doubtful. It is a point which need not be dis- cussed here, and is, indeed, of little importance. That she was a woman of superb and command- ing beauty, a false wife, a false mistress, and of immeasurable profligacy, Catullus has himself told us. There could only be one end to a passion of which such a siren was the object ; and, exquisite as the poems are which precede the breaking of the spell, it is in the poems recording the gradual pro- cess of disenchantment, and the struggle between the old love and the new loathing, that Catullus touches us most. How piercing is the pathos of such a poem as the Si qua recordanti (Ixxvi.), or the epigram in which he says that he loves and loathes, but knows not why, only knows that it is so, and that he is on the rack : — Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse reciuiris. Nescio : sed fieri sentio et excrucior. j__ >m y •-,' - , Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is dearer to him than both his eyes : — Credis me potuisse meee maledioere vitsB, Ambobus mibi quae carior est ooulis ? Non potui, nee, si possem, tarn perdite amarem. ' ' / 'i And he suffered the more, as he had lavished on her the purest affections of his heart. His 343 CATULLUS AND LESBIA love for her — such was his own expression — was not simply that which men ordinarily feel for their mistresses, but such as the father feels for his sons and his sons-in-law : — Dilexi turn te, non tantum ut vulgus amicam, Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos. 7^ ■-->- '] But shameless as she is, and it is an impossibility for her to be otherwise, he cannot abandon her. Do what she will he is her slave. His mind, he says, was so straitened by her frailty, so beg- gared by its own devotion, that, even if she became virtuous, he could not love her with absolute goodwill, and if she stuck at nothing — drained vice to its very dregs — he could not give her up : — Hue est mens deduota tua, mea Lesbia, culpS, Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa sue, "Dt jam neo bene velle queam tibi, si optima fias, Nee desistere amare, omnia si facias, l^y.. y- V , He compares himself to a man labouring under a cruel and incurable disease, a disease which is paralysing his energy, and draining life of its joy :— Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi, Eripite banc pestem pernioiemque mibi, Quae mibi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus Expulit ex omni pectore Isetitias. 'H .' / '/ - "_,'. ' Nearly sixteen hundred years had to pass before the world was to have any parallel to these poems. And the parallel is certainly a remark- 344 CATULLUS AND LESBIA able one. In the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Lesbia lives again ; in the lover of the dark lady, Lesbia's victim. Once more a false wife and a false mistress, not indeed beautiful, but with powers of fascination so irresistible that deformity itself becomes a charm, makes havoc of a poet's peace. Once more a passion, as degraded as it is degrading, sows feuds among friends, and " infects with jealousy the sweetness of affiance." Once more rises the bitter cry of a soul, conscious of the unspeakable degradation of a thraldom which it is agony to endure, and from which it would be agony to be emancipated. Compare for instance : — ^7 love is as a fever, longing still For that whioh longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. Past cure I am, now reason is past care. And frantic mad with evermore unrest. My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are, (Sonnet cxlvii.) with Catullus, Ixxvi. And:— Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill. That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds. Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, The more I hear and see just cause of hate? (Sonnet cl.) with Catullus, Ixxii., Ixxiii., Ixxv. ; while Sonnet 345 CATULLUS AND LESBIA cxxxvii. presents a ghastly parallel with Catullus, Iviii. Again, how exactly analogous is the ad juration to Quintius in Epigram Ixxxii., with what finds expression in Sonnets xl.-xlii., and Sonnet cxx. But it would be tedious as well as superfluous to cite particular parallels where the whole position — which may be summed up in the two words of Catullus, " Odi et amo," — is identical. Not the least remarkable thing about Catullus is his range and his versatility. It is ti'uly extra- ordinary that the same pen should have given us such finished social portraits as " Suffenus iste " (xxii.), "Ad Furium" (xxiii.), "In Egnatium" (xxxix.); the perfection of such serious fooling as we find in the " Lugete, O Veneres" (iii.), and, if we may apply such an expression to the most delicious love poem ever written, the "Acme and Septimius " (xlv.) ; of such humorous fooling as we find in the " Varus me meus ad suos amores" (x.), the "O Colonia quse cupis" (xvii.), the "Adeste, hendecasyllabi," the " Oramus, si forte non molestum " (Iv.) ; such epic as we have in the " Peleus and Thetis " ; such triumphs of richness, splendour, and grace as we have in the three marriage poems ; such a superb ex- pression of the highest imaginative power, pene- trated with passion and enthusiasm, as we have in the Attis ; such concentrated invective and satire as mark some of the lampoons ; such mock heroic as we have in the Coma Berenices ; 346 cAtullus and lesbia such piercing pathos as penetrates the autobio- graphical poems, and the poems dedicated to Lesbia. Catullus has been compared to Keats, but the comparison is not a happy one. His nearest analogy among modern poets is Burns. Both were, in Tennyson's phrase, " dowered with the love of love, the scorn of scorn," and, in the poems of both, those passions find the intensest expression. Both had an ex- quisite sympathy with all that appeals, either in nature or in humanity, to the senses and the affections. Both were sensualists and libertines without being effeminate, or without being either depraved or hardened. In both, indeed, an infinite tenderness is perhaps the predominating feature. Both had humour, that of Catullus being the more caustic, that of Burns the more genial. Both were distinguished by sincerity and simplicity ; both waged war with charlatanry and baseness. Burns had the richer nature and was the greater as a man; Catullus was the more accomplished artist. But it is time to turn to the book which has recalled Catullus and Lesbia. Mr. Tremenheere has, with great ingenuity, succeeded in concoct- ing by a process of elaborate dovetailing a very pretty romance which he divides into nine chapters, the first being " The Birth of Love," the second, third and fourth, "Possession," "Quarrels" and "Reconciliation," the fifth, sixth, 347 CATULLUS AND LESBIA and seventh, " Doubt," " A Brother's Death " and " Unfaithfulness," the last two, " Avoidance " and "The Death of Love." The chief objection to this is that it is for the most part fanciful, and is absolutely without warrant, either from tradi- tion or from probability. Many of the poems pressed into the service of his narrative by Mr. Tremenheere have nothing whatever to do with Lesbia. Such would be xiii., "The invitation to FabuUus," xiv., "The Acme and Septimius." The translations are very unequal. Of many of them it may be said in Dogberry's phrase that they " are tolerable and not to be endured," or to borrow an expression from Byron " so middling bad were better." Thus the powerful poem to Gellius (xci.) is attenuated into : — 'Twas not that I esteem'd you were As constant or incapable Of vulgar baseness, but tbat sbe For whom great love was wasting me, The spice of incest lacked for you ; And though we were old friends, 'tis true, That seem'd poor cause to my poor mind. Not so to yours. Sometimes the versions are detestable. Nothing could be worse than to turn : — NuUi ilium pueri nullas optavere puellse No more is she glad to the eyes of a lad, To the lasses a pride, — or Dulcis pueri ebrios ocellos 348 CATULLUS AND LESBIA as Her minion's passion-sodden eyes, — which might do very well for a coarse phrase like " In Venerem putres," but not for " Ebrios." But sometimes the renderings are very felicitous. As here : — Quid vis ? qu§,lubet esse notus optaa Eris : quandoquidem meos amores Cum longS, voluisti amare poenS,. Cost what it may, you'll win renown ! You shall, such longing you exhibit Both for my mistress — and a gibbet! And the following is happy : — Nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium Ilia rumpens. Nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem Qui illius culpS, cecidit ; velut prati TJltimi flos, prsetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est. Ah, shameless, loveless lust, sweet, seek no more To win love back, by thine own fault it fell, In the far corner of the field though hid, Touch'd by the plough at last, — the flower is dead. The following also is neat and skilful, but how inferior to the almost terrible impressiveness of the original : — Di si vostrfim est misereri, aut si quibus unquam, ExtremS, jam ipsS. in morte tulistis opem. Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi, Eripite banc pestem pemiciemque mihi, Quae mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus Expulit ex omcni pectore leetitias. 349 CATULLUS AND LESBIA Oil God! if Thine be pity, and if Thou E'en in the jaws of death ere now, Hast wrought salvation — look on me ; And if my life seem fair to Thee tear this plague, this curse away, Which gaining on me day by day, A creeping slow paralysis, Hath driven away all happiness. Six love stories stand out conspicuous in the records of poetry — those which find expression in the Elegies of Propertius, in the Sonnets and Canzoni of Dante and Petrarch, in the Sonnets of Camoens, in the Astrophel and Stella of Sid- ney, in the Sonnets of Shakespeare. But never has passion, never has pathos, thrilled in intenser or more piercing utterance than in the poems which that fatal " Clytemnestra quadrantaria " — to employ the phrase which may actually have been applied to her — inspired, and in which the rapture and loathing and despair of Catullus found a voice. 350 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE ^ THIS book, which is partly a compilation from the uncollected writings of the late Richard Simpson and partly the composition of Father Bowden himself, is an attempt to show that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. It contains much interesting information ; it is well written, and we have read it with pleasure. With much which we find in it we entirely concur and are in full sympathy. We take Shakespeare quite as seriously as Father Bow- den does. We believe that the greatest of dramatic poets is also one of the greatest of moral teachers, that his theology and ethics deserve the most careful study, and that they have, too frequently, been either neglected or misinterpreted. We agree with Father Bowden that nothing could be sounder and more persis- tently emphasised than the ethical element in this poet's dramas ; that his ethics are, in the ^ The Religion of Shakespeare. Chiefly from tte writings of the late Mr. Richard Simpson. By Henry Sebastian Bowden. London. 351 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE main, the ethics of Christianity, and that so far from Shakespeare being simply an agnostic and having no rehgion at all, as Birch and others have contended, he is, if not formally, at least in essence, as religious as jEschylus and Sophocles. And now Father Bowden must forgive us if we are unable to go further with him. We have no prejudice against Roman Catholicism, or against any of the creeds in which religious faith and reverence have found expression, — " Tros Rutulusve fuat nuUo discrimine agetur." Our sole wish is, if possible, to get at the truth. It is of comparatively little consequence now to what form of religion Shakespeare belonged, but it would be at least interesting, if it could be shown that any particular sect could legiti- mately claim him. In discussing this question we must bear in mind that in Shakespeare's time, as in the time of the ancients, religion had two aspects, its private and its public. In its public aspect it was a part of the machinery of the state, an essential portion of the political fabric. Till the Reformation there had been practically no schism and no difficulty. After the Reforma- tion a most perplexing problem presented it- self. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, in a long and terrible conflict, struggled for the mastery. At the accession of Elizabeth the victory had been won, so far as England was concerned, by Protestantism, and Protestantism 352 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE was the accepted religion of the nation. As such, it was the duty of every loyal citizen to uphold it ; it became with the throne one of the two pillars on which the fabric of the state rested. Roman Catholicism became identified with the political rivals and enemies of England. Protestantism became identified with her lovers and upholders. Thus the Church and the Throne became indissoluble, at once the sym- bols, centres, and securities of political harmony and union. This accounts for the attitude of Hooker, Spenser, Shakespeare and Bacon towards Episcopalian Protestantism on the one hand, and towards Puritanism on the other. About Shakespeare's political opinions there can be no doubt at all, for, if we except the Comedies, he preaches them emphatically in almost every drama which he has left us. They were those of an uncompromising and intolerant Royalist, in whose eyes the only security for all that is dear to the patriot lay in implicit obedience to the will of the sovereign, and in upholding a system to which that will was law. That he should, therefore, have had any sympathy with the Roman Catholics is, on a priori grounds, exceedingly improbable. We turn to his Dramas, and what do we find ? It would be no exaggeration to say, that there is not a line in them which indicates that he regarded the Roman Catholics with favour. On the contrary, they abound in points directed B.C. 353 z THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE against them. Thus he twice goes out of his way, once in Henry F. ^ and once in Alls Well that Ends Well, to observe that " miracles have ceased." There is a bitter sneer at them in the reference to the sanctimonious pirate and the commandments, in Measure for Measure. * There can be little doubt that the words in the porter's speech in Macbeth, "'here's an equi- vocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven," have sarcastic reference to the doctrine of equivocation avowed by Garnett and popularly associated with the Jesuits ; while the remark about the fitness of "the nun's lip to the friar's mouth" ^ in AlVs Well that Ends Well is another concession to Protestant pre- judice. In King John such a speech as the following may be dramatic, but who can doubt that it expressed the poet's own sentiments ? — Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England Add thus much more, — that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; But, as we under Heaven are supreme head, So, under Him, that great supremacy, * Act I. Sc. i. This is a very pointed reference, hut in the second instance, in AlVs Well that Binds Well, Act H. Sc. i., " They say miracles are past," he gives a turn to the ex- pression which converts it into a rebuke of Rationalism. » Act I. Sc. ii. = Act n. Sc. ii. 354 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE Wliere we do reign, we will alone uphold, "Without tlie assistance of a mortal hand ; So tell the Pope; all reverence set apart To him, and his usurp'd authority. King John is, indeed, simply the manifesto of Protestantism against papal aggression. What could be more contemptible than the character of Pandulph and the part which he plays ? Is it credible that Shakespeare could have had any sympathy with a religion whose minister is one whom he represents as saying : Meritorious shall that hand be called. Canonized, and worshipped as a saint. That takes away by any secret course Thy hateful life. In Henry VIII., again, we have an elaborate eulogy of the Reformation, Cranmer being pre- sented in the most favourable light, Gardiner in the most unfavourable, while Wolsey is almost as detestable as Pandulph. It is really pitiable to see the shifts to which the authors of this book are reduced to make out their theory. They have even pressed into its service Jordan's palpable and long-exploded forgery of John Shakespeare's Will, and the fact that John Shakespeare's name is found on a list of Recusants, when it is, in that very list, expressly stated that he had absented himself from church, simply from fear of process for debt. Passages in the dramas are similarly perverted. Shakespeare's hostility to the Pro- 355 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE testants induced him, we are told, to pour contempt on Oldcastle by depicting him as Fal- staff. His delineation of Malvolio, and his frequent sneers at the Puritans, are attributed to the same motive. The famous lines in Hamlet, placed in the mouth of the Ghost, are cited to prove his belief in purgatory ; the comical penances imposed on Biron and his friends in Love's Labour Lost to prove his belief in penance. When in Lear it is said of Cordelia that : — She shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes. we are to see another indication of Shakespeare's religion as " they have a Catholic ring about them." Sentiments which are common to all sects of Christians are regarded as peculiar to Roman Catholicism ; mere dramatic utterances are forced into illustrations of supposed personal convictions. What is habitually and systemati- cally ignored is, that Shakespeare, being a dramatic poet, must necessarily make his characters express themselves dramatically, and that, as he was depicting times preceding the Reformation, his sentiments and expressions very naturally took the colour of the world in which his characters moved. The wonder is not that this should have occurred, but that Shake- speare should, in spite of the gross anachronism of such a process, have so Protestantized pre- Reformation times. We are quite willing to 356 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE concede to Father Bowden that there is enough to warrant us in assuming that Shakespeare did not regard the Puritans with favour. But his dislike to them arose not from the fact that they were Protestants, but that they were not orthodox Protestants. He was opposed to them for the same reasons that Elizabeth and James, Hooker and Bacon were opposed to them. Their hostility to his profession, their sanctimonious cant, and the surly asceticism of their lives, no doubt contributed to his preju- dice against them. Nor are we in any way justified in concluding that Shakespeare accepted the teaching of the Church of Rome in spiritual matters. Nothing could be more unwarranted than what is assumed by Father Bowden in the following passage. He is speaking of Shakespeare's atti- tude in relation to death. " ' Ripeness is all ' ; and he shows us in all his penitents how that ripeness is secured, sin forgiven, and heaven won on the lines of Catholic dogma and by the Sacraments of the Church." What are the facts ? Shakespeare's reticence about a future state, and what may await man, in the form of reward and punishment hereafter, is one of his most striking characteristics. Neither Cordelia nor Desdemona, neither Con- stance nor Imogen in their darkest hours expresses any confidence in the final mercy and justice of Heaven. Othello, falling by a fate as 357 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE terrible as it was undeserved, dies without a syllable of hope. " The rest is silence " are the ominous words with which Hamlet takes leave of life. When Gloucester believes himself to be standing on the brink of death, in the farewell which he takes of the world he has no anticipa- tion of any other ; all he contemplates is "to shake patiently his great affliction off." So die Lear, Hotspur, Romeo, Antony, Eros, Enobar- bus, Macbeth, Beaufort, Mercutio, Laertes. So die Brutus, Coriolanus, King John. In the Duke's speech in Measure for Measure, where he is preparing Claudio to meet death, death is merely contemplated as an escape from the pains and discomforts of life. Macbeth would ' jump ' the world to come if he could escape punishment in this. Prospero suggests no hope of any waking from the " rounding sleep." Even Isabella, dedicated as she was to religion, in fortifying Claudio against his fate draws no weapon from the armoury of faith. It is just the same in the dirge in Cymbeline, in the soliloquy of Posthumus, in the consolations addressed by the gaoler to Posthumus.' ' In opposition to these may, it is true, be cited Othello's words to Desdemona — Othello, V. 2 : the Duke's remark about putting the unrepentant Barnardine to death — Measure for Measure, IV. 3 : the dying speeches of Buckingham and Catharine in Henry VIIL, II. 1 ; IV. 2 : Laertes on Ophelia, — Hamlet, V. 1. But these passages, and others like them, cannot be cited as evidence to the contrary; they are merely dramatic utterances. 358 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE The last passage is perhaps more remarkable than any, because it shows the utter ambiguity of the directest expression which the poet has left on the subject. Gaol. — Look you, sir, you know not which way you go. Post. — Yes, indeed do I, fellow. Gaol. — ^Your death has eyes in 's head then ; I have not seen him so pictured : you must either he directed by some that take upon them to know, or take upon yourself, that which I am sure you do not know ; or jump the after inquiry on your own peril ; and how you shall speed in your journey's end, I think you'll never return to tell one. Post. — I tell thee, fellow, there are none want eyes to direct them the way I am going, but such as wink, and will not use them. Cymbeline, V. 4. Shakespeare, in truth, never attempts to lift the veil which for living man can be raised only by Revelation. The silence of his philo- sophy, — for we must not confound occasional sentiments and mere dramatic utterances with what justifies us in deducing that philosophy, — in relation to a life after this, is unbroken. It is, indeed, remarkable that he represents such speculations, — the dwelling on such problems, — as more likely to disturb, perplex, and hamper us, than to give us any comfort. As Hamlet puts it in the well-known lines : — The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment. With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. 359 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE Did he believe in the immortality of the soul and in a future state ? Who can say ? What we can say is, that if we require affirmative evidence of such a faith, we shall seek for it in vain. In the Sonnets, where he seems to speak from himself, the only immortality to which he refers is the permanence of the impression which his genius as a poet will leave — immortality in the sense in which Cicero and Tacitus have so eloquently interpreted the term. But on the other hand, if there is nothing to warrant a conclusion in the affirmative, there is nothing to warrant one in the negative. His attitude is precisely that of Aristotle in the Ethics; a life beyond this is neither affirmed nor denied, but the scale of probability inclines towards the negative, and his moral philosophy proceeds on the assumption that life is the end of life.^ Goethe has said that man was not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to at- tempt to solve them, that he might keep within the limits of the knowable. And it is within the limits of the knowable that Shakespeare's theology confines itself. Starting simply, as Gervinus says, from the point, that man is born with powers and faculties which he is to use, and with powers of self-regulation and self- determination which are to direct aright the powers of action, the " Whence we are," and »Cf. Ethics, I. X. 11, and lU. vi. 6. 360 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE the " Whither we are going," are problems for which he has no solution.^ Men must endure Their going hence e'en as their coming hither : Ripeness is all. And for ripeness or unripeness, man's will is re- sponsible. He would probably have agreed with the saying of Heraclitus, jJ^o? dv0p(O7rq> Salfiwv. Throughout his Dramas all is explicable, with the single exception of Macbeth, without refer- ence to supernaturalism. Perfectly intelligible effects follow perfectly intelligible causes ; the moral law solves all. But especially conspicu- ous is the absence of the theological element where we should especially have looked for it. " Men and women," says Brewer, " are made to drain the cup of misery to the dregs ; but, as from the depths into which they have fallen, by their own weakness, or by the weakness of others, the poet never raises them, in violation of the inexor- able laws of nature, so neither does he put a new song in their mouths, or any expression of confi- dence in God's righteous dealing. With as hard and precise a hand as Bacon does he sunder the celestial from the terrestrial kingdom, the things of earth from the things of heaven." * His theology, indeed, in its application to life, seems to resolve itself into the recognition of ^ Shakespeare Commentaries, Vol. II. 620-1. " Article on Shakespeare, Quarterly Review for July, 1871, p. 46. 361 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE universal law, divinely appointed, immutable, inexorable, ubiquitous, controlling the physical world, controlling the moral world, vindicating itself in the smallest facts of life, and in the most stupendous convulsions of nature and society. In morals it is maintained by the ob- servance of the mean on the one hand, and the due fulfilment of duty and obligation on the other. In politics it is maintained by the sub- ordination of the individual to the state, and of the state to the higher law. Hooker says of Law, that as her voice is the harmony of the world, so her seat is the bosom of God. The Law Shakespeare recognises ; of the Law-giver he is silent. As he is dumb before the mystery of death, so is he equally reticent in the face of that other mystery. He has nothing of the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament, of the Homeric poems, and of Milton. Nor has he ever expressed himself as Goethe has done in the famous passage in Faust, beginning : " Wer darf ihn nennen." In two important respects he seems to differ from the Christian conception. He represents no miraculous interpositions of Providence, no suspension of natural laws in favour of the righteous, and to the detriment of the wicked. He is too reverend to say with Goethe, that man, so far as direction in action goes, is practically his own divinity. But he does say and represent — and that repeatedly — what is expressed in such passages as these : — 362 THE EELIGION OF SHAKESPEAEE Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Whicli we ascribe to Heaven : the fated sky Gives us full scope. AlVs Well that Ends Well. Men at some time are masters of their fate. Julius Ccesar. Omission to do what is necessary- Seals a commission to a blank of danger. Troilus and Cressida. And we have no right to expect that Provi- dence will cancel it. If deeds do not go with prayer, prayer is not likely to be of much avail. So the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II. : — The means that Heaven yields must be embrac'd And not neglected; else if Heaven would And we will not, Heav'n's offer we refuse :— whUe the words which he puts into the mouth of Leonine in Pericles are, we feel, significant: — Pray : but be not tedious, For the Gods are quick of ear, and I am sworn To do my work with haste. He has no sympathy with pious recluses. He has depicted no saint or religious enthusiast, or written a line to indicate that he had any respect for their ideals. With him, — Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues. They say best men are moulded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad. Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds 363 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE are typical axioms in his philosophy of life. And the nearest approaches he has given us to the saintly type of character are the sentimental pietists, Henry VI. and Richard II., both of whom are failures, and border closely on moral im- becility. On the spiritual and moral efficacy of faith, he has nowhere laid stress. In his innumer- able reflections on life and man, in his maxims and precepts, there is, as a rule, scarcely any flavour of Christian theology. They are just such as might be expected from a pure rationalist. Such is the philosophy of Hamlet, of Jacques, of the Duke in Measure for Measure, and of Prospero. Even Friar Laurence, though an ecclesiastic, reasons and advises just as a Stoic philosopher might have done. The friars in Much Ado about Nothing, and in Measure for Measure, the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II., and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in Henry IV. and Henry v., and Cardinal Beaufort in Henry VI., act and speak like mere men of the world. A bulky volume would scarcely sum up the ethical and political reflections scattered up and down his plays ; a few pages would comprise all that could be put down as exclusively theological. This complete subordination of the theological ele- ment to the ethical is the more conspicuous when we compare his dramas with the Homeric Epics, and with the tragedies of ^Eschylus and Sophocles. And yet if a thoughtful person, after going 364 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE attentively through the thirty-six plays, were asked what the prevailing impression made on him was, he would probably reply the profound reverence which Shakespeare shows universally for religion — his deep sense of the mysterious relation which exists between God and man. We feel that his silence on transcendental sub- jects springs not from indifference, but from awe. The remarkable words which he places in the mouth of Lafeu, in All's Well that Ends Well (Act II. 3), raerely sum up what we hear sotto voce in various forms of expression through- out his dramas ; " we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear." And the same reverence and humility find a voice in the verses in which, in all probability, he took leave of the world of active life. Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. No poet has dwelt more on the duty and moral efficacy of prayer, on the omnipresence of God, 365 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE and on the fact that in conscience we have a Divine monitor. Of the respect which Shakespeare entertained for Christianity as a creed, of his conviction of its competency to fulfil and satisfy all the ends of religion in men of the highest type of intelli- gence and ability, we require no further proof than his Henry V. Henry V. is undoubtedly his ideal man, as Theseus in the (Edipus Coloneus is the ideal man of Sophocles. And Henry V. is pre-eminently a Christian. Wherever Shake- speare refers to the person and to the teachings of Christ, it is always with peculiar tenderness and solemnity. His ethics are in one respect essentially Christian, and that is in their em- phatic insistence on the virtues of mercy and forgiveness of injuries. In Measure for Measure, he stretched the first as far as the Master Him- self stretched it, at the eleventh hour, to the penitent thief. And in the Tempest, that play which seems to embody in allegory Shake- speare's mature and final philosophy of life, who does not recognise the symbol of Him who rules, not merely in justice and righteous- ness, but in benevolence and mercy, when Prospero, with sinners and traitors and foes in his power, proclaims — The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance : they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. 366 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE He struck this note in one of the earliest of his plays : — "Who by repentance is not satisfied, Is nor of heaven, nor earth : for these are pleas'd. By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeas'd.' and the note vibrates through his works. It is the crowning moral of Measure for Measure ; it is one of the dominant notes in Cymbeline. He also reflects Christianity in the beautiful optim- ism which discerns in evil the agent of good, and in calamity and sorrow the benevolence and mercy of God. This is the philosophy which penetrates what were probably his last three dramas, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. In these respects, then, it may fairly be main- tained that Shakespeare is Christian. For the rest his dramas might, so far as their philo- sophy is concerned, have come down to us from classical antiquity. Nothing can be more Greek than the main basis on which his ethics rest — the observance of the mean, and the recogni- tion of the relation of virtue to the becoming. When Claudio says : — As surfeit is the father of much fast. So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint: ' Two Gentlemen of Verona : V. 4. 367 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE when Norfolk says : — The fire that mounts the liquor till 't o'erflow In seeming to augment it wastes it ; when Friar Laurence tells us that : — Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime 's by action dignified ; and Portia that There is no good without respect, we have not only the keys to his ethics but the texts for sermons which find living illus- trations in the fall of Angelo, of Coriolanus, of Timon, and of many others of his protagonists. Thus do his ethics temper and readjust for the sphere of working life, those of the Divine Enthusiast who legislated, in some respects, too exclusively perhaps, for a kingdom which is not of this world. And so, his ' religion ' being, to borrow an expression of his own, " as broad and general as the casing air," it has come to pass, that Shakespeare has been claimed as an orthodox Protestant by Knight, Bishop Wordsworth, and Trench ; as an orthodox Roman Catholic by M. Rio, Mr. Simpson, and Father Bowden ; and as a simple agnostic by Gervinus, Kreysig, and Professor Caird. " He hath," says Sir Thomas Browne speaking of himself, " one common and authentic philo- sophy which he learnt in the schools, whereby he 368 THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE reasons and satisfies the reason of other men : another more reserved and drawn from experi- ence whereby he satisfies his own." It may be, it may quite weU be, for he has left nothing to justify conclusion to the contrary, that the words of Shakespeare's Will — mere formula though they be — are the expression of what he "reserved" to satisfy himself, and that he accepted the Christian Revelation. It may be, that what we are certainly warranted in con- cluding about him, represents all that can be concluded, namely, that : — He at least believed in soul, was very sure of God. E.C. 369 A A INDEX Accius quoted, 244 Addison, IB : 272 : 281 ^SCHTLUS, 59 ; quoted, 62 ; his descriptions of Nature, 241; Ms theology, 267: 261 : 364 Alo^us, 287 Alcman quoted, 240 Alamanni, 123 Anacrbon, 286 Anthology, Greek, 116 : 117 : 243 Antimachus of Colophon, his Poems, 289 Antipatbr of Sidon, 116 Apollonius Ehodius, 78 ; beauty of his descriptions, 242-3 Archilochus quoted, 287 Ariosto quoted, 79 ; his Orlando, 113 Aristophanes, 242 : 260 : 280 ; his censure of Euri- pides, 265 Aristotle, 63 : 67 ; influence on Spenser, 120-1; style. 122; his doctrine of the Kadapa-is, 264-5 ; his Esthetics, 265-6; Poetics, 274-6 ; his Bhetoric, 287 Armstrong, Dr. John, his connection with Thomson, 333 Arnold, Matthew, 63 ; quoted, 21 : 105 : 106 : 194 : 272-3 Athen^tjs, 293 Ausonius, his Bosce, 246 Avitus, 251 Bacon, Lord, his SylvaSylva- rum, 114 ; his Latin style, 122; quoted, 182; on poetry, 279 Barclay, his Argents, 129 Barnum, the late Mr., on Advertisement, 158 Bbaconspield, Lord, quoted, 219 Bbneckb, Mr. E. F. M., his Antimachus of Colophon 371 INDEX and Position of Women in Greek Poetry reviewed, 2B6-93 BsNTLBy, Eichard, 1B6 Bbrnays, Prof., on the Kadapa-ts of Aristotle, 265 BOILBAU, 125 BoLiNGBROKE, Lord, 119 : 321 BoswHLL, James, 134 BowDBN, Eev. H. Sebastian, Ms Religion of Shake- speare reviewed, 351-69 Brewer, Eev. Prof., quoted, 361 Brown, Mr. J. T. T., his Authorship of the Kingis Quair reviewed, 172-82 Browne, Sir Thomas, his Hydriotaphia, 102 ; quoted, 368 Browning, Eohert, on the Comparative Study of Ancient and Modern Clas- sical Literature, 64 Browning, Mrs., 297 Burke, Edmund, 71 : 100-1 : 126 : 126 Burns, Eobert, 145; Com- parison with Catullus, 347 Butcher, Prof. S. H., his Some Aspects of the Greek Genius reviewed, 255-69 BuTLBR, Bishop, quoted, 214 Butler, Mr. Samuel, on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 222-4 C^DMON quoted, 95 Cainb, Mr. Hall, 28 Callimachus, 242 Camobns, 850 Campbell, Prof. Lewis, 259 Carbw, Thomas, 305 Catullus, his descriptions of Nature, 245 : 336-9; quoted, 285 ; characteristics of his genius, 335 ; his Attis, 339-40 ; his pathos, 337-8 ; his connection with Lesbia, 342-5 ; parallel between Poems to Lesbia and Shakespeare's Sonnets, 345-6 ; his versatility, 346 ; comparison with Burns, 347; Mr. Tremen- heere's version of the Love Poems, 347-9 Cawthorn, John, 60 Chaucer, 53 : 8 : 122-3 Churchill, Charles, quoted, 159 Cicero, influence on English prose, 61 ; as a critic of rhetoric, 278-9 ; on im- mortality, 360 Clarendon, 123 Classics, influence of the Greek and Eoman Classics on English Literature, 58-63 ; exclusion of from Schools of Literature by the English Universities, 45-64 ; effects of this illus- trated, 76-83 372 INDEX Claudian quoted, 246 COLVIN, Mr. Sidney, his edition of Stevenson's Letters reviewed, 165-71 Coleridge, S. T., 127 : 130 : 281 COLBEIDGB, the late Lord, on Greek, 255 Cory, William, 253 Cousin, Victor, his theory of beauty and art, 272 Criticism, reasons of pre- sent degraded state of, 13-26 ; characteristics of current criticism described, 26-30 : 270-1 ; effects on literature generally, 31-4; refusal of the Universities to train critics and men of letters, 38-44 ; lethargy and indifference of scholars, progressive degradation of literature the certain result, 43-44 Critics, characteristics of popular, 27-31 : 93-109 : 110-32 : 151-7 Crowe, William, 249 Ctnewulf, 96 Dante, 49 ; quoted, 835 ; his Sonnets and Canzoni, 350 De Quincby, Thomas, char- acteristics of, 203-4 ; his comparative failure, 305; Mr. Hogg's recollections of, 2(B-10 Douglas, Gavin, his trans- lation of Virgil, 96-7 Drayton, Michael, 60 Dryden, his Discourse on Epic Poetry, 66; quoted, 153; on the functions of poetry, 280 ; his transla- tions, 148 DuBos, the Abb6, 281 Dunbar, William, 176; Mr. Smeaton's Life of, re- viewed, 183-92 ; character- istics of his poetry, 190-1 Dyer, John, his descriptive poetry, 248 Earlb, Prof., on relation of Classics to English Litera- ture, 59 (note) Earle, John, his Microcos- mographie, 129 Editors, their relation to current literature, 22 ; in no way responsible for the present condition of cur- rent literature, 23-24 Ennius, 59 Euripides, 82; his fine pictures of Nature, 242 ; quoted, 262 ; his Alcestis quoted, 286 Fbltham, Owen, his Re- solves, 129 Flaccus, Valerius, 246 Fletcher, Phineas, 101 Footb, Samuel, quoted, 205 373 INDEX Fox, John, his Book of Mar- tyrs, 113 Feaunch, Abraham, his Countess of Pembroke's Ivy Church, 309 Feoudb, James Anthony, on the eflfeot of discouraging the study of the Classics, 66 GrAENBTT, Father, 354 GrEOPFRHY of Monmouth, 102 G-BEVINUS, Prof., quoted, 360 Q-LANViLLB, Joseph, 104 Gibbon, Edward, 125 : IBO : 198 GOBTHE, 49: 86 ; quoted, 273 : 360 : 362 Goldsmith quoted, 247 GossB, Edmund, his Short History of Modern Eng- lish Literature reviewed 110-32 GossiNG, analysis of the accomplishment, 115 ; com- pared with Euphuism, id. GowBE, John, 124 ; Confessio Amantis, 196 Gray, Thomas, on Lydgate, 98 Gebbnb, Robert, 14 Hall, William, Mr. Sidney Lee on, 216 Hampolb, Richard of, his Pricke of Conscience, 179 Harrison, Mr. Frederic, 35 Hawbs, Stephen, his Pas- time of Pleasure, 200 Hbraclitus quoted, 361 Hbembsianax quoted, 287 Hill, Aaron, 331 HoccLBVB, Thomas, 198 Hogg, Mr. James, his Recol- lections of De Quincey reviewed, 203-10 HoMBE quoted, his fine descriptions of Nature, 237-9 ; his women, 286 : 288 ; his description of Hades, 297 Hooker quoted, 362 Horace, influence of his Epistles and Satires on English poetry, 60 ; quoted, 151 : 297 : 301 ; deficient in poetic sensibility, 336 Hroswitha, 251 HuxLBY, Prof., on Merton Chair at Oxford, 38 Ibycus, 240 Jago, Richard, 249 Jambs I. of Scotland, his Kingis Quair, 172 ; its genuineness vindicated, 174-82 Japp, Dr. Alexander, Life of De Quincey, 209 Jbbb, Prof., his services to Greek Literature, 258 Johnson, Dr., quoted, 152 374 INDEX JoNSON, Ben, on Poetry, 280 JowBTT, Prof., quoted, 64 JussBKAND, M., his Literary History of the English People reviewed, 193-202 Keats, John, 127 : 298 : 347 Lahdok, W. S., 298 Lang, Mr. Andrew, 269 Lauderdale, 310 Leaf, Mr. "Walter, 259 Lee, Mr. Sidney, his Life of Shakespeare reviewed, 211-8 ; on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 229-30 Le Gallibnne, Mr. Richard, his Betrospective Reviews reviewed, 151-7 Lbopabdi quoted, 20 : 300 Lesbia and Catullus, 335- 60 Lbssing, on Philologists, 86; his Laocoon, 41 ; his Ham- burgishe Dramaturgie, 67 Log-rolling, its pernicious effects, 183-44 LONGINUS, the Treatise attributed to, discussed, 276-8 ; quoted, 270 Lydgate, his style and versification, 98; id., 115; characteristics ' of his poetry, 198-9 Macaulay, Lord, 146 : 151 Mallet, David, claim to authorship of Eule Britan- nia discussed, 321-4 Malory, Thomas, 201 Mannyng, his Handlying of Synne, 195 Marlowe, Christopher, 14 Martial, his epigrams, 337 Max MtjLLER, Prof., 52 Mbleager, his Anthology, 116-7 ; quoted, 243 Menander quoted, 262 Mimnermus, his love poetry to Nanno, 287 Milton quoted, 41 (note) : 62 ; his apology for Smectymnuus, quoted, 103 ; on poetry, 267; quoted, 212; music of his verse, 317 Mitpord, Eev. J., on the corrections in Thomson's Seasons, 330-4 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 125 : 306 Morel, M. Leon, his Mono- graph on Thomson, 319 More, Sir Thomas, his Utopia, 101 More, Henry, 274 Morgan, Sir George Osborne, his Translation of VirgiVs Eclogues reviewed, 308-17 Moblby, Mr. John, 63; quoted, 64 Myers, Mr. Ernest, 259 MtJLLEE, Prof. E., his Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alien, 264 375 INDEX Ogilvib, John, 310 Ovid, 60 : 177 : 178 : 246 Pacuvius, his Dulorestes quoted, 244 Palgravb, Francis Turner, his Landscape in Poetry reviewed, 236-49 ; an ap- preciation of, 2B0-4 Patbr, "Walter, 62 : 152 : 265 : 267 Pbcock, Eeginald, his Ee- pressor, 128-9 Petrarch, 287 : 296 Pbrsius quoted, 15 Phillips, Mr. Stephen, his poems reviewed, 294-300 Pindar quoted, 262; his word pictures, 240 Plato, his Symposium, 78-9 ; quoted, 263 ; his theory of poetry, 274 : 276 Plutarch, his pictures of women, 290 Pomprbt, John, his Choice, 101 Pope quoted, 84 ; on Philo- logists, 86 ; quoted, 139 ; his Satires and Epistles, 125; his alleged revision of Thomson's Seasons dis- cussed, 328-32 Propbrtius quoted, 246 Publishers, honourahle character of the leading, 23 Quarterly Ebvibw, article on From Shakespeare to Pope, 40 Quintilian as a critic, 278 Eaffety, Mr. Frank W., his Books worth Beading reviewed, 145-50 Eossetti, Dante G-ahriel, quoted, 173 EosSBTTi, "William Michael, his edition of Shelley's Adonais, 76-83 EucBLLAi, his dramas and his VApi, 124 Saintb-Bbuvb, his essays, 41 ; on Philologists, 86 ; his criticism, 270; the master of Matthew Arnold, 281 Saintsbury, Prof., his Short History of English Litera- ture reviewed, 93-109 Sallust, 61 Schiller, 41 Schick, Dr., on Lydgate's versification, 99 ScHiPPER, Dr. J., on Dun- har, 183 SCHMEDING, Dr. Gr., his Monograph on Thomson, 318 School op English Litera- ture at Oxford, its de- plorable organization, 45- 72; how this may be remedied, 73-6 376 INDEX Scott of Amwbll, 249 Scott, Sir Walter, on Dun- bar, 186 Sblf-Advbrtisbmbnt, its organization and effects, 158-64 Sbnbca, influence on English prose, 61 Skdulius, 251 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, his style, 117-9 Shakbspbaeb, 62 : 81-2; Clarendon Press edition of his Hamlet, 84r-92 ; quoted, 154:158; Mr. Lee's Life ef, 211-8 ; scantiness of traditions of, 213; his sonnets, various theories, 219-20; about difficulties of supposing them auto- biographical, 225-6 ; his relations with Southamp- ton and Pembroke, 228- 34 ; story in the Son- nets probably fictitious, 285 ; religion of Shake- speare, 351-69 ; his poli- tics, 352-3 ; not a Ro- man Catholic, 352-6 ; on death, 357-8 ; silence about a future life, 359, and about metaphysical questions, 360 ; comparison in this respect with Aris- totle, 360; his theology, 362-4; on prayer, 365; on conscience, 366 ; his attitude to Christianity, 366 ; when his ethics are Christian, 868; his reli- gious ideas summed up, 868-9 Sharp, Archbishop, quoted, 218 Shbllby, his Adonais, 76- 83 ; absurd criticism of his style, 126 Shbnstonb, "William, 249 Sidney, Sir Philip, 131 Simpson, Richard, 351 : 368 Smart, Christopher, his Song to David, 340 Smbaton, Mr. Oliphant, his life of Dunbar reviewed, 188-92 Sophocles, 242; his ethics, 267-9 ; quoted, 285 ; his ideal man, 366 Spenser, Edmund, 112 : 118 ; influence of Greek and Latin Classics on, 120-1 ; influence of, on Milton, 121; on the functions of poetry, 280 Stanihurst, Richard, 308 Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 35 Stesichorus, his Calyce, 287 Stevenson, R. L., Letters reviewed, 165-71 Strabo quoted, 287 Swift, Jonathan, his Senti- ments of a Church of B.C. 377 EB INDEX England Man, 113; of a Tub, 144 Tale Tacitus quoted, 20 : 192 : 264 ; as a critic, 278-9 ; on immortality, 360 Talleyrand quoted, 210 Tennyson, Lord, 62 : 162-3 : 245 : 247 : 298 : 337 ; as a critic, 252 Terence, women of, 292 Text-Books on English Literature, specimens of, 76-150 Thackeray on Wordsworth and Moore, 250 Theocritus, 243 Theognis quoted, 262 Thomson, James, 243 ; quoted, 248; claim to the author- ship of Rule Britannia vindicated, 321-8 ; cor- rections in the Seasons discussed, 328-34 Thorpe, Thomas, 216 : 227 : 235 TovEY, Rev. D. C, his edi- tion of Thomson's poems reviewed, 318-34 Tremenheerb, Mr. J. H. A., his version of Catullus' Love Poems, 335-50 Trissino, his Sofonisba, 123 Thucydides, 258 : 260 ; on hope, 262 Tuppbr, Martin, 251 Tyler, Mr. Thomas, on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 228 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 223 : 234 Universities, their indiflfer- ence to the interests of literature, 38-40 : 45-50 ; effects of the exclusion of the Greek and Roman Classics from the so-called Schools of Literature at Oxford and Cambridge, 56-71 Varro, as a critic, 278 Virgil, his beautiful descrip- tions of Nature, 246-6 ; his Eclogues, 308-17 Voltaire on Philologists 86 Walters, Cuming, on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 220-1 Warburton, Bishop, 205 ; quoted, 270 Warton, Dr. Joseph, on Thomson's poetry, 380 Warton, Thomas, on Lyd- gate, 98 Watson, Mr. William, great beauty of his English hexameters, 317 Wharton, Dr., his Sappho, 148 Willmott, Rev. Aris, his 378 IKDEX Gems from English Litera- ture, 163-4 WiLLOUGHBTjhis Avisu, 101: 225 Wordsworth, "William, 153 ; on Dyer's poetry, 248 ; his poems on classical legends, 298 "WORSFOLD, Mr. Basil, his Principles of Criticism reviewed, 270-82 Wrangham, Archdeacon, 310 Wright, Dr. Aldis, his edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet, 84^92 Wright, Mr. W. H. Kearley, his West Country Poets reviewed, 301-7 Wtntown, his Chronicle, 180-1 Xenophon on women, 290 Young, Edward, quoted, 87 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printirg Works, Frome, and London. 379 + iiili Hii'tlll ililill I ] II I 111 li I: 1 , ! Nil I: III III I !ltl|l!JII)!l!ll i 1! ! illRiili"!! '"""'" ii. I!! m 111' ii !ll ilii I ! II li'l'lillll ||||H 1 ' lii 111'' 'I il mmi „ iiiiii iiiiiii ! II 1 r ! { 11 i{:!i i!i I !i i : i!! i|ll{ llii.i '( nil: li !i iiiliilliil