are, capable of indefinite exploitation by novelists. Readers who care
to be mildly harrowed by these topics will find in this volume all the
pabulum to which they have been accustomed in innumerable other books.
But those who have no particular taste for this sort of thing beyond
moderation will confine themselves to wondering in what the revolt of
youth here consists and in what way they are expected to find it a
moving performance. Louie breaks away from home, goes on the stage, is
a failure, returns and marries her cousin. There is a suicide and a
good deal of illicit love-making, and at the end the heroine behaves
with conventionally noble unconventionality. But these things are
wearisome if one has no special taste for them.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. Heinemann.
7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Diversions? In a sense they are all, they have always been, diversions.
Mr. Gosse has never allowed the chains of the critical vocation
to weigh heavily upon him. It has been consistently his especial
characteristic that he has approached the most difficult problems in
literature with undaunted courage and vivacity. Where others have sat
down to the difficult siege of Donne or Swinburne with the pedantic
long faces of writers determined not to flinch even though all their
readers fall asleep during the fray, Mr. Gosse advances lightly, blows
a pleasant blast on the trumpet of his familiar prose and topples the
most obdurate walls over before him, without ever losing the least
part of his dignity. This it is which makes his reputation one of the
assets of modern English literature. He represents among us a school
of critics of which the disciples in this country are by no means too
numerous. During a long career he has found and continually practised
the secret of being almost always sound and never dull, invariably
vivacious, and hardly ever superficial. His critical essays have always
the gay, untrammelled air, if not the frivolous substance, of pure
diversions.
In his new collection he ranges among a variety of subjects and takes
now a well-worn road, now a path that has tempted few enquirers.
_The Songs of Shakespeare_ is not precisely a subject to attract the
dealer in literary fireworks. It is, on the other hand, a subject
ripe for the most portentous, the most meaningless, the most tedious
aberrations of the pedant. Yet how delicately does Mr. Gosse, in no
more than five pages, steer between these extremes and plant the arrow
of his comment exactly on the necessary spot! Benjamin Disraeli, in
his capacity as novelist, makes a theme not much less forbidding to
the critic who doubts his own ability to be original. But Mr. Gosse
is, with justice, serenely confident in the power of his style to
overcome this difficulty. There is perhaps little in this essay which
has not been both perceived and expressed before. But it is Mr. Gosse
who crystallises mature opinion on the novels of Disraeli in a passage
which might be taken as a model of discrimination and style or critical
prose:
Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the earlier
part of this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment to the public
in a popular and not very dignified kind. He contended with the
crowd of fashionable novelists whose books consoled the leisure of
Mrs. Wititterly as she reclined on the drawing-room sofa. He found
rivals in Bulwer and Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His
brilliant stories sold, but at first they won him little advantage.
Slowly, by dint of his inherent force of genius, his books have not
merely survived their innumerable fellows, but they have come to
represent to us the form and character of a whole school; nay, more,
they have come to take the place in our memories of a school which,
but for them, would have utterly passed away and been forgotten.
Disraeli, accordingly, is unique, not merely because his are the only
fashionable novels of the pre-Victorian era which anyone ever reads
nowadays, but because in his person that ineffable manner of the
"thirties" reaches an isolated sublimity and finds a permanent place
in literature. But if we take a still wider view of the literary
career of Disraeli, we are bound to perceive that the real source of
the interest which his brilliant books continue to possess is the
evidence their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of
the man. Do what we will, we find ourselves looking beyond Contarini
Fleming and Sidonia and Vivian Grey to the adventurous Jew who,
by dint of infinite resolution and an energy which never slept,
conquered all the prejudices of convention, and trod English society
beneath his foot in the triumphant irony of success. It is the living
Disraeli who is always more salient than the most fascinating of his
printed pages.
We have chosen this passage, not because it is the most remarkable in
the book, but almost at random, and in preference to some which are
more brilliant and more highly wrought. But it is a fair example not
only of the grace, but also of the precision, with which Mr. Gosse
habitually uses his pen. His _Three Experiments in Portraiture_ are
specimens of the same skill in delineation with the added advantage
that the author knew his subjects directly. This is an art in which he
has always excelled. His slighter, and his more elaborate, portraits
of Swinburne stand easily among the first things of the kind in our
language; and though perhaps Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lord Cromer, and
Lord Redesdale did not offer material so variegated or so unusual, it
may be for that reason that Mr. Gosse's portraits of them are even
more interesting as studies by a virtuoso. When we come again to pure
criticism, we find in _The Message of the Wartons_, a lecture delivered
before the British Academy, the same graceful and distinguished gesture
with which Mr. Gosse points to the interesting and useful traits to
be discerned in his subject. Mr. Gosse will never be a true or a
factitious fanatic elevating some spark of genius in a neglected worthy
above the true fire discovered in others by the just sense of mankind.
He makes no exaggerated claim for the Wartons, but he does see in them
what has not been sufficiently insisted on before.
They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the
worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task
to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad
defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at
Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow
cold," and he was an ineffective Poet Laureate. His brother Joseph
felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without
attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.
All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between
1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to
make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy
of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some
faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had
laid down in his celebrated _Réflexions_ (1719) that the poet's
art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents
and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been
accepted and acted upon by Pope and all his followers. To have been
the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which
excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to
demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and
this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton.
They had a faint conception: they demand respectful attention. These
are indeed the accents of moderation, but then, as Mr. Gosse knows, to
praise the Wartons with enthusiasm would be unjust. It is the centre
of his critical talent that he is always moderate and precise in his
estimates, and this fact gives his commendation more value, his blame
more weight, and makes his judgments more readily acceptable.
It is possible to bring forward charges against Mr. Gosse. The two
essays in this book on contemporary literature, _Some Soldier Poets_
and _The Future of English Poetry_, suggest that, at least when they
were written, the author was not fully acquainted with the buds of the
new spring. The opinions expressed in them are, within the limits of
his apparent knowledge, equally acceptable to both older and younger
critics; but these limits are somewhat narrower than they might have
been. But it would be ungracious, as well as disproportionate, to make
much of this point. What is important is that Mr. Gosse is a veteran
of English criticism, who has enriched our literature with a body of
work which has no parallel and whose powers show no signs of flagging.
When we consider his latest, we involuntarily turn our eyes back to his
earlier books, and we cannot resist the conclusion that he has rendered
to English letters a very remarkable service indeed. The latest is
a continuation of the earliest, and this is, after all, the most
important thing which can be said of it.
A CRITIC IN PALL MALL. By OSCAR WILDE. Methuen. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume appears, rather regrettably, with no indication of how it
came into existence, how Wilde wrote the essays of which it is composed
or who chose them for republication and on what principle. But the
references given at the heads of the essays show that they are reviews
collected from the _Woman's World_, the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and other
papers. Wilde did not gather them together nor, so far as we know,
even contemplate such a book. It is probable that he would be a little
dismayed by it if he could see it.
In some of these pieces there occur phrases and judgments which are the
genuine Wilde at his best, witty and well turned if not always wise.
There is, for example, a pleasing pertness in his remark on dialect
poetry:
To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of
romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in
the pathos of provincialism.
There is a long essay on Lefébvre's _Embroidery and Lace_ which is very
characteristic, and has, we think, been quoted before. There is a short
essay on _Dinners and Dishes_, from which the following passage may be
extracted:
There is a great field for the philosophic epicure in the United
States. Boston beans may be dismissed at once as delusions, but
soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, blue fish, and the
pompons of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies, particularly
when one gets them at Delmonico's. Indeed, the two most remarkable
bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and the
Yosemite Valley, and the former place has done more to promote a good
feeling between England and America than anything else has in this
century.
These are worth having, if Wilde is worth having at all, because they
are characteristic. There would have been no great occasion for weeping
if they had been lost or if they had never been clipped from the papers
in which they appeared. But since someone has had the industry to
collect them, and since there is a sufficient demand to warrant their
issue in volume form, we may receive them with a moderate pleasure.
The greater part of the volume, however, does not rise to this level.
Even the most brilliant and versatile of writers cannot consistently
display his individual powers in journeyman work; and Wilde, though his
wit was irrepressible, almost involuntary, was no more conscientious
than any other reviewer. When the good sentences came they came: when
they did not, he made no particular effort to maintain either his style
or his ideas on any very elevated plane. There is no great value for
the reader of to-day in a picture of Mrs. Somerville in a review of a
book on her by a Miss Phyllis Browne. And no reader is likely to take a
very vivid delight in Wilde's comment on a book called _How to be Happy
though Married_, that
Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful
collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a
perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as
one of the best of wedding presents
or in the jokes that Wilde quotes from the book. Unfortunately it is
by no means clear that the anonymous compiler has realised how much
uninteresting matter he is reprinting. He closes the volume with
twenty-odd pages of _Sententiæ_, selected from reviews in which the
gems of thought and language were detachably scattered. But these gems
include such remarks as "No one survives being over-estimated," and "No
age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor." We cannot therefore
excuse him on the ground that he knew he was dragging lumber into the
light, and did so from a pious if mistaken motive.
CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE PROBLEM OF HAMLET. By the RT. HON. J. M. ROBERTSON. Allen & Unwin.
5_s._ net.
Swinburne's book, as Mr. Gosse explains in his introduction, is the
complement of his work _The Age of Shakespeare_. He had intended
a comprehensive survey of the whole of the Elizabethan drama, the
glories of which he spent a great part of his life in celebrating. He
did enough of it to show what the complete work would have been; the
outlines are all here, but they are only filled in patches.
That, carrying on as he did the Lamb tradition, and expressing it in
his own language, he was sometimes over-enthusiastic, every reader of
his sonnet on Tourneur knows. That he was liable to say incompatible
things on different pages, where his purposes were different, is
also common knowledge. We do not go to him for an exact "placing" of
men or for temperate statement; it might be roughly said that he was
willing to regard any minor Elizabethan writer as a master, unless he
desired to use him to point a contrast with someone else, in which
event the unfortunate playwright might be treated as a buffoon, an
incompetent, and an impostor. Yet even of just and balanced criticism
there is much in this book. No critic before him has so acutely
dissociated the great Marlowe from the Greenes, Peeles, and Lodges,
who are indolently classed with him. (It is characteristic that in
making this dissociation he says of one of Peele's plays that it is
"a riddle beyond and also beneath solution" how a man of any capacity
could have "dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in
its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of _Edward
I_.") And the essay on Chapman, here reprinted, is one of the finest
panegyrics and most illuminating pieces of imaginative criticism in the
language. He may, when he turns his searchlight on little men, illumine
them too much; but Chapman was not a little man, and with space to move
in and time to think in Swinburne here produced a masterpiece. The long
passage on Browning and his obscurity is almost as good, so good that a
digression, otherwise unpardonable, is self-excused.
The book as a whole is among Swinburne's best prose books. His writing
is what it ever was. Almost every word and sentence is duplicated.
He would write: "No man and no woman who has ever ridden on a bus or
driven on a cab down the quiet bye-streets and crowded thoroughfares
of Paris or of London could fail to have noticed with interest and
to have condemned, or at least deprecated, without hesitation or
afterthought, the design of the posters displayed on the hoardings or
exhibited in the windows, even as, with no greater hesitation and no
less microscopic afterthought, he would have," &c., &c. We feel that the
sentences might have been split into halves and two books of precisely
similar meaning made out of the one. Yet his manner is a part of him.
Even his most serpentine sentences have vigour and directness when they
are read aloud; and his invective is as entertaining as ever. Swinburne
had a very small vocabulary as a poet, but a very large one as a writer
of denunciatory prose. He refers to a play of James Howard's as "a
piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the
nostrils of the nauseated reader," and through a series of "laughing
jackasses," "howling dervishes," and things ignoble, impure, infamous,
and abominable he reaches the climax of his abuse with the beautiful
appellation, "verminous pseudonymuncule."
Mr. Robertson also has planned a large work on the drama, but his
is restricted to Shakespeare. He proposes to complete a series,
of which his _Shakespeare and Chapman_ was an instalment, on "the
canon of Shakespeare." He has more concentration and more industry
than Swinburne, and he may complete his task. He is not an inspired
critic and, unlike Swinburne's, his manner does not contribute to
the readableness of his books. He is often--though an engagingly
acrimonious controversialist--heavy-footed; and he has a passion for
words like "theorem" and "confutation" which is almost incomprehensible
in a man who obviously loves the simplest and most beautiful art. In
the present volume he tackles the problem of Hamlet. He ridicules
those who think that Hamlet was very vacillating; who would not be
upset if he discovered that his father had been murdered by his uncle
and his mother, and who would not hesitate before killing a man on
the word of a ghost? But he admits, as we all must admit, that there
are inconsistencies in the play, and he argues, with what we think
conclusive force, that these are derived from Kyd's lost _Hamlet_,
which Shakespeare used as a basis. Here, as elsewhere (in _Othello_
and _The Merchant of Venice_ for example), Shakespeare was handicapped
by his sources. Mr. Robertson sometimes pushes his arguments too
far, and he exaggerates, we think (where he finds it convenient),
the inexplicability of Hamlet's character. But he has spent immense
industry on the book, and it is a contribution to Shakespearean study
that no scholar will be able to ignore. We wish, by the way, that he
would not spend so much of his time, here and elsewhere, arguing with
people, German and other, who are not worth arguing with.
APPRECIATIONS OF POETRY. By LAFCADIO HEARN. Heinemann. 15_s._ net.
Hearn was a sensible critic. But it is a fact--and a pity--that his
criticisms of English literature were addressed to an audience of
Japanese students. In examining a few of them (and we have already
had two immense volumes) we get some instruction and entertainment
from observing what he selects for Japan and how he explains it--a
comparison and a contrast of the Eastern and Western points of view.
Here and there, too, trying everything "on the dog," he reveals
unexpected merits in English writers. In the "Interpretations" he
demonstrated not merely the worth of Longfellow, but the intermittent
genius of Mrs. Norton. But we can have too much of a rather interesting
thing, and it is inevitable that these lectures on Tennyson, Rossetti,
Swinburne, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Morris, and various minors should
be too elementary, however sound they may be, and however happy the
quotations, to give serious English readers much satisfaction. We note
with pleasure that many years ago Hearn was pointing out to Japan the
great qualities of Robert Bridges as a poet of landscape.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE (1415-1789): A History of the Foundations
of the Modern World. By W. C. ABBOTT, Professor of History in Yale
University. Bell. Two vols. 30_s._ net.
Every schoolboy, in the Macaulayan sense, has at some time or other
determined to write a history of the world in twenty volumes from the
earliest times to the present day. Achievement is fortunately given
to few. Omniscience becomes yearly more impossible, and, since the
human mind can no longer single-handed cope with the accumulations
of human knowledge, in history, as in so many other things, we have
reached an age of intensive specialisation. These are truths which
are continually being impressed upon us by the schools of modern
history, and that they are to a great extent truths will be shown by
a glance at any well-loaded shelf in a library devoted to the output
of the modern historian. Yet there is distinct evidence of a reaction
against this meticulous specialisation; there are signs that several
most learned historians are discarding the historical microscope for
the historical telescope and are yielding to the old fascination of
writing histories of the world. The free airs of the New World seem
to encourage this new phase of an old fascination. It is not very long
ago that Professor Hayes of Columbia University took a large brush
and a large canvas and produced two excellent and impressive volumes
which he called _A Political and Social History of Modern Europe_.
These two volumes were in effect a world history from 1500 to 1915. The
mere thought of such a venture would produce a feeling of intellectual
vertigo in most historians of the old world. But now Professor Abbott
of Yale University comes along with two great volumes, and a promised
third, in which he approaches world history with an even larger
canvas and larger brush. He tells us himself that he is presenting us
with "a new synthesis of modern history." We confess to as profound
a distrust of the word "synthesis" as some people have of the word
"definitive," and when a professor tells us that he has produced a new
synthesis of history we are inclined to believe that this is another
way of admitting that Providence has not granted him the gift of clear
thinking or clear writing. But Professor Abbott's preface does him and
his book an injustice. Some doctors, if you go to them with a swollen
arm, will tell you that you have œdema of the arm; but there is no
need to be frightened--the doctor is only telling you, what you know
already, that you have a swollen arm. So, too, there is really no need
to be frightened by the historian who assures you that his book has a
synthesis; he probably only means, what you know already, that his book
has a subject.