Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1895.

CONTENTS.

TSBURY'S SPECIMENS OF ENGLISH PROSE

TON'S LIFE OF EDWARD CECIL...

[ocr errors]

ADY'S EXPERIENCES IN THE JUNGLE

INN'S MISCELLANIES

ELS OF THE WEEK

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

...

...

STMAS BOOKS

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

ARY TABLE-LIST OF NEW BOOKS

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

imens of English Prose Style. Selected d annotated, with an Introductory reface, by George Saintsbury. (Kegan aul, Trench & Co.)

SAINTSBURY does so much that it is a der he should often do so well. The secret o doubt, that he has plenty to say and is embarrassed in saying it. His matter bundant, and his style is distinguished certain facile competency which is the of a good craftsman. In this volume Specimens of English Prose Style' he en at his best. The selection is compreive and well made; the annotations are ys intelligent, and are sometimes as as such things can be; the introduction, ssay on the nature and development of lish prose style, is in the author's happiest The book, in fact, has but one fault we can see it is identical in "get-up" appearance with a certain famous, and cky, anthology of Living English

[ocr errors]

deliberate attempt at style in prose expression-date no further back than the Elizabethans. The attempt was made, he notes, in "one of two directions": that of euphuism and that of what may be called an Anglicized classicism. The latter is the main road, and along it, accordingly, Mr. Saintsbury elects to travel. He descants with perfect truth upon the results of trying to imitate "the forms of a language possessed of regular inflections and strict syntax in a language almost destitute of grammar,' the confusion of relatives and demonstratives, the disarray of conjunctions, the impossible worship of the oratio obliqua; and he is especially sound in his remarks on the consequences of the absence of all but classical models. In those days, as in these, though for very different reasons, men wrought not as they ought, but altogether as they would. They "abound in what look like wilful and gratuitous obscurities, cacophonies, breaches of sense and grammar and rhythm." Not to recognize so much is, he holds, uncritical, and even absurd. It is a fact that" Browne's antithesis is occasionally an anticlimax, and his turn of words occasionally puerile"; that Milton's sentences "constantly descend from the mulier formosa to the piscis"; and that "Clarendon gets himself into involutions through which no breath will last, and which cannot be solved by any kind effort of repunctuation." One reason for this was, as has been noted, the absence of any but classical models; another, on which Mr. Saintsbury (and here we think he is greatly in error) is disposed to lay little stress, that the age was one of high and fine imagination, and that the men in whose work it is glorified were men who felt deeply and were stirred in writing by the necessity of finding adequate and passionate expression for the matter they had so closely at heart. language was still an instrument, and had not yet become a tool; it was to do that in the following generation, when, as Mr. r. Saintsbury, as we have had occasion Saintsbury puts it, "the period of original emark, is always excellent in tracing and copious thought"-and, we may add, course of a literary movement, and in the period of heroic individualities-had eralizing, from a great collection of "ceased in England for a time, and men, erials, the tendencies which have been having less to say "--and, it is incontestable, dominating influences of a particular an infinitely inferior capacity for emotionod or a series of periods. Nothing "became more careful in saying it." Then d well be better than his sketch of the Dryden came, and French influences began gress of English prose, from its beginnings to work; "and before the period had waned Malory to its decadence in the indi-English prose as an instrument [to our author lalism of the present day. It is easy to "" "instrument and "tool" appear to be rrel with some of his details; it is impos-convertible terms] had been perfected." e not to admire his treatment of the larger In other terms, in the hands of Dryden, s of his subject, the comprehensiveness and under him of Halifax and Temple, his generalizations, the acuteness and English prose was modified, its ideals were ndness of the more abstract among his changed, the canons on which it should luctions, the critical sense which he mani- henceforth proceed were formulated and s throughout. He starts from the pro- established. It lost immensely in inspiraition-which is incontestable, but which tion and in colour, in pomp of numbers and been none the less contested that the majesty of march; but it gained in ease thods and purposes of English prose are and clearness, in precision, neatness, and a ferent, "by the extent of the whole dozen useful qualities besides. In a word, aven of language," from those of English it became practical-the appropriate expresrse. The "necessity of beginning some- sion of a prosaic and rather commonplace ere" obliges him to begin his sketch at generation. It made Swift possible, and alory, whose work is "notoriously an the "unrivalled decency" of Addison, and aptation of French originals." He rethe amiable urbanity of 'The Vicar of arks of Latimer and Ascham that both, Wakefield' and 'The Citizen of the World.' beit "highly vernacular" in parts, are conversational where they are not clascal"; and he concludes that the real beginings of English prose-of a conscious and

-ts.'

The

But it put an end for generations to the art of writing impassioned prose without "dropping into poetry." Not until Burke was there anything to remind the world of

that union of dignity with rapture which is Milton's; not until Mr. Ruskin did English prose revisit the heights of feeling and expression.

The second half of the eighteenth century, as Mr. Saintsbury happily remarks, is in respect of its prose style decidedly reactionary. The work of Johnson and Gibbon is full of symptoms of revolt against "the plainness and vernacular energy " which are the characteristics of the men who wrote between Dryden and Swift-between 1660 and 1720. Prose became once more an instrument to be played upon for its own sake and the pure delight of performance. Men grew careful of their sentences, not merely as sentences, but as arrangements of words and effects of "sonority." It was recognized that the language of prose was something more than a tool. And this development was in other directions than that of "elaboration and dignity." dignity." It is not only the age of the Idler and the 'Decline and Fall,' of Berkeley and Hume and Edmund Burke; it is also that of Fielding and Goldsmith, of Richardson and Walpole and Sterne. Imaginative prose was once more possible, and, given the proper temperaments, its practice became inevitable. In the distance is the literary practice of the nineteenth century— the comic as well as the serious parts of Dickens, the elegant ease of Thackeray, the eloquence of Mr. Ruskin, the graphic descriptions of Carlyle. The "consciously or unconsciously formative period of English prose " has come to an end. Whatever has since been done has been done by men who have "either deliberately innovated upon, or obediently followed, or carefully neglected the two great principles which were established between 1660 and 1760." One of these is that which limits "the meaning of a sentence to a moderately complex thought in point of matter"; the other, that which admits "the necessity of balance and coherent structure in point of form." It is remarked, however, that

[ocr errors]

one attempt at the addition of a special kind of prose " has been made, but that it is "foredoomed to failure" ; and the remark contains the secret of our author's weakness and the weakness of his whole argument. The style in question is the "flamboyant" style: the style introduced by Wilson and De Quincey, illustrated later on by Mr. Ruskin, and popularized, in fact if not in theory, by the example of Carlyle and Landor-Landor, who, "together with much prose that is nearly perfect, gave the innovators the countenance of an inclination to the florid and of a neo-classicism that was occasionally un- English.” These, it appears, "did much to break down the tradition of English prose in which sobriety was the chief thing aimed at," and so to bring about that evil state in which the alternative to the production of what is called "prose poetry" "is the production of prose which is "absolutely without principles of style." To Mr. Saintsbury, it would seem, individualism in prose is the accursed thing; English prose began with Dryden and ended-really ended-with Swift; and such magnificent exceptions as have since occurred exist in spite of laws, and because they cannot help it. His ideal, whatever he may say to the contrary, is one of balance

and measure. He is constrained to admire
the other thing, but he protests against
it. Uncompromising and romantique in his
theory of verse, he is a puritan in his theory
of prose. Give him that "tradition in which
sobriety is the chief thing aimed at," and
he is satisfied. Its existence sanctifies the
prose of Walter Scott; its absence vitiates
(to some extent) even the prose of Ruskin
and Thackeray. We have seen the scant
account he takes of temperament in dealing
with the great writers of the seventeenth
century; he admits its magnificence, but he
seems all the while to be deploring its
excesses; he reveres his Milton and his
Browne, but his heart is with Gulliver'
and Colonel Jack.' It is the same when he
comes to treat of their inheritors of the
present day. The "prose poetry style" is
the death of literary morals. It has "in-
vaded history, permeated novel - writing,
affected criticism so largely that those who
resist it in that department are but a scat-
tered remnant." Quorum pars magna-the
reflection is irresistible! And irresistible,
too, is the conclusion that Mr. Saintsbury
abhors in the writer of prose that exercise
of the individual temperament which he most
applauds in the poet; that prose to him is
less an expression of art than a means of
saying something or other; and that prose to
be prose should be distinguished by the pre-
sence of qualities the opposite of those which
poetry must possess to be poetry. This is,
perhaps, unfairly put, but Mr. Saintsbury is
himself a hot gospeller, and an opponent is A capital alexandrine is
not unwilling to adopt his methods. More-
over, an example of his criticism will show
that it is not so open to reproach as it seems.
We have heard him lament the liability to
lapse of the men of the heroic age; we
have seen who are the writers of his choice.

and as little of that of Wordsworth; there are
not more than forty lines of Sydney Smith; the
selection from Coleridge includes none of the
literary criticism by which he is best known;
the Southey excerpt is taken not from the Nel-
son,' but from 'The Doctor'; those from Lamb
and Landor will please no one but Mr. Saints-
bury. Miss Austen is well treated; but Hazlitt
is not. Wilson is better represented than
he deserves; the specimen of Macaulay is
typical. As for De Quincey, his fortune
is a trifle mixed. Here are none of his won-
derful variations on themes from Browne
and the older artists; none of those "crack
passages" on which is based his reputation
as a writer of imaginative prose. There is,
however, a capital specimen of his handi-
work in accordance (more or less) with that
tradition in which sobriety was the chief
thing aimed at; and from the Opium-
Eater' a passage that might have been
selected with a view to demonstrating the
vices of "the prose poetry style," so full of
good iambic verse it is. "But the third
sister," he begins, in a good prose rhythm,
"who is also the youngest"! And then he
"drops into poetry," and flourishes away in
octosyllabics, alexandrines, and even good
decasyllables. Here, for instance, are ex-
amples of the first :-

If we will, we may hear him admit that,
after all, only Swift is "impeccable."
There are as many bad sentences after
Dryden's reform as in the tasteless days of
Milton and Browne and Hobbes!

[ocr errors]

We have no space in which to consider Mr. Saintsbury's analysis of latter-day prose the "Aniline style," the "style of Marivaudage," and the style of "the disciples of literary incuria (which last is surely to be excused, in some sort, by the necessities of journalism); or to do more than refer in passing to a scholarly disquisition on the differences between metre and rhythm, between the essentials of the movement of verse and the essentials of the movement of prose. Turning to the anthology itself, we find little to question and much to praise. The earlier writers are excellently represented, though the specimens of Jeremy Taylor and Browne in Hazlitt's selection are decidedly more happy than Mr. Saintsbury's. The quotations from Steele and Addison are fairly good; Middleton and Berkeley have no reason to complain; Pope might just as well have been omitted; there is no fault to be found with what is quoted from Richardson. Fielding, however, and Samuel Johnson are not at all as they should be, and Sterne might well be more fortunate;

reverse; Scott is represented not by the death speech of Elspeth Mucklebackit, but by a couple of fragments of rather bald and wordy

:

Hush whisper while we talk of her!

*

For noon of day or noon of night,
For ebbing or for flowing tide.

*

Bounding, or with a tiger's leap.

The kingdom is not large, or else no flesh would
live;

it would sound well in Drayton's 'Polyol-
bion,' or, indeed, in any English poem in
that impossible metre. And here are notes
notes positive enough to be the despair of
modern minor poets-of choice and moving

heroic verse :—

She droops not, and her eyes rising so high.

*

*

**

The fierce light of a blazing misery.

*

But narrow is the nation that she rules.

It is a pity that Mr. Saintsbury has not
noted that in impassioned speech the common
movement of the language is iambic.
If he
had, this quotation from De Quincey had
seemed less cruelly ironical.

Life and Times of General Sir Edward_Cecil,
Viscount Wimbledon, Colonel of an English
Regiment in the Dutch Service, 1605-31,
and one of His Majesty's Most Honourable
Privy Council, 1628-38. By Charles
Dalton, F.R.G.S. 2 vols. (Sampson
Low & Co.)

Ir to the facts stated on the title-page of
this book it were added that Lord Wim-
bledon commanded the disastrous expe-
dition against Cadiz of 1625, the story of
his life would be told with sufficient com-
pleteness. His character was unattractive,
and he was distinguished only by ill luck.
But men of little account and acts of
apparent insignificance may rise to strange

a revolution.

Wimbledon is

tinction can be established beyond dispute. Twice at the outset of his downward course the king met a Scottish army in the fell and had to yield on each occasion. Th inefficiency of his soldiers and servant and the alienation of his English subt rendered him powerless. And that he was powerless was mainly due to Led Wimbledon.

Yet the magnitude of the evil he wrought is strangely in contrast with his opportunes for doing mischief. Lord Wimbledon d not, like other conspicuous actors in the Stuart tragedy, devote to the king a lifelong service. On the contrary, he spent

chief portion of his life in the service of the Dutch Government. He was not, he Strafford, a man of restless energy and domineering temper: he was a ploding soldier, diligent and courageous, but leader of men. Nor had he that dangerous gift, the spirit of enthusiastic, unselfish devotion, which animated Laud and Stra ford. Though Lord Wimbledon invariat sought to do his duty, he as invariaty sought to do good to himself. If a kee instinct for self-preservation inspires and safe advice, he was of all men the safest of counsellors.

As happens when misfortune is in fe ascendant, the very circumstances which endowed Lord Wimbledon with influence in the State augmented its untoward resi A soldier and statesman of mature years when Charles came to the throne, he seemed to be the last representative of the good old Elizabethan traditions. As grandson of Lord Burghley and nephew of Lord Salisbury he might claim sagacity as his birthright. And he was sagacious, but with this limitation: he possessed the lawyer-like and prudent temperament of his ancestors without the foresight of a true politician.

Had Lord Wimbledon been a statesman worthy the name of Cecil, he could have rendered to his country invaluable assist ance. He, best of all men, knew by s experience that knavery and imbec characterized the servants of the Cro He and his comrades in the expe against Cadiz had undergone disgrace in danger because the soldiers were

trained, their weapons useless, their is
uneatable, and the ships unworka
Had he, with the authority of that es
perience, and of years spent in war a
official duty, compelled the king to
justice to his soldiers and sailors, and
punish those who robbed and neglecte
them, he would have taught the king at
outset of his reign the lesson he most neede
and the crown might have passed uninte
ruptedly from Charles I. to Charles II.
Inordinate self-reliance was at the root
Charles's misgovernment. He believed
he was always in the right; he believe
that all who opposed him were wrong
he therefore was
submit to one who was so rightful as b
persuaded that all m
self. His self-reliance reached even to
greater height. Charles believed that at
was, so were his servants; they share!

Burke is a trifle unlucky; Gibbon is the importance when a nation is drifting towards his right-mindedness, they must, therefor Viewed thus, the life of Lord be as successful also; to sift their conda He stands foremost among those ill advisers was needless; the idea that they could b who guided Charles I. to destruction. Lord Wimbledon's title to this unenviable dis- gull Lord Wimbledon accordingly preferre

narrative; of Byron's letters there is no

thing; there is nothing of the prose of Keats,

cials who had wrecked the Cadiz ex-
lition before it left our shores were
ther punished nor dismissed. The king's
atuation ran its course, and some fifteen
rs later he twice experienced the fate
it in 1625 befell Lord Wimbledon :
1639 and 1640 Charles led his soldiers
ainst the army of Scotland, and had to
reat baffled and defeated, not so much
his opponents as by his followers. And
addition to that fatal inefficiency of the
il and military services, for which Lord
imbledon was so largely, though in-
ectly responsible, he was directly re-
nsible for that alienation of the English
ple which handicapped the king's efforts
meet the Scots in 1639 and 1640.
The unpaid, unfed, untrained soldiers,
o were the curse of the Cadiz expedition,
re, whenever they were called out, the
se of their own countrymen. Whether on
march or in their billets, they spread
for throughout England; uncontrolled
I unprovided for, they revenged them-
res on their fellow subjects by robbery
murder. To this result of royal mis-
rernment Lord Wimbledon could not shut
eyes. To prevent such a chronic occa-
1 of disorder he felt called upon to tender
advice, and he took exactly the wrong
rse. He did not insist upon the true
edy, that the soldiers' grievances should
removed, and that they should be pro-
ed against the officials who plundered
cheated them. He advised that the
ricts where the soldiers were stationed
uld be placed under martial law.
he mere idea of martial law was to
glishmen an offence. It was to them a
nge intruder into the ordinary law of
land, a dreadful novelty suggestive of the

rors of continental warfare. And when
king, fulfilling his destiny, raised the
al standard against Scotland, the fear of
rtial law in the hands of Roman Catholic
tains, of those soldiers of fortune who
1 ravaged the Netherlands, and, most of
in the hands of Strafford, did much

place the king at the mercy of the

otch invader. Nor did Lord Wimbledon's ister influence end with the introduction o England of martial law. As if to inre a universal hatred against the Governnt, to a grievance that more specially ected the mass of the people he added a sation which fell upon every small landner throughout the country. It was Lord imbledon who, according to Mr. Dalton, imbledon who, according to Mr. Dalton, ggested to Charles the revival of the obso

obey the summons.

e, but unrepealed statute of Edward II., nich gave the king the right to summon ch of his subjects as were owners of an tate worth 407. a year to receive knightod, and to fine such as refused or neglected Some money, undoubtedly, was by this brought into the treasury, but far rger was the widespread discontent which e "knights' fees "created, and which in 541 told with such overwhelming_force gainst Strafford and the king. Death, Owever, removed Lord Wimbledon about year before the actual beginning of that and which he had prepared for his royal aster. But of that result Lord Wimbleon was assuredly as ignorant as he must ave been of another result of the coming evolution, namely, that it would hand over

his stately mansion at Wimbledon to "my
Lord" Lambert.

A book that has been to the writer a
labour of delight is not always to the
reader a delightful labour. And if the 800
pages that Mr. Dalton devotes to the cele-
bration of a man endowed neither with
brilliancy in success nor picturesqueness in
misfortune fail to captivate the "reading
public," to whom he addresses his book,
he must not be disappointed. The three
years that he has spent over the life of
Lord Wimbledon have been by no means
wasted. The mass of contemporary docu-
ments, admirably annotated and indexed,
that Mr. Dalton has collected, illustrat-
ing the war of Dutch Independence and
English history during the reigns of James
and Charles I., is of much value. Lord
Wimbledon and his associates, for the most
part, are permitted to describe themselves.
And although, in our day of literature made
easy, "monograph" is a term of reproach,
these volumes can be recommended to a
student who, though "well up in Gardiner,"
is willing to gain fresh insight into the
causes of that collision between the Crown
and the people which shaped into its
present form the England in which we
live.

Two Years in the Jungle: the Experiences of
a Hunter and Naturalist in India, Ceylon,

the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. By
William T. Hornady. (Kegan Paul,
Trench & Co.)

London's immensity, surrounded by nearly four million human beings speaking my own language."

He was struck by the attention which he, "a mere nobody," met with from the authorities of the British Museum, and dwells on the absence of any such national institution at home. On the other hand, as he points out, the expensive, and to a poor man inaccessible, catalogues and monographs of the British Museum compare unfavourably with the free distribution to deserving applicants, by the liberality of the American Government, of the reports of various departments of State.

The author visited the collections of the Challenger in Edinburgh, and was "puzzled to know how such an expedition could go so far and accomplish so little." The bent of his own studies, however, is towards the vertebrates, and especially the larger mammalia, which may possibly lead him to undervalue researches of a very different kind. He had an unlimited order for crocodiles, besides elephants, bisons, tigers, and other large game; indeed, his commission seems to have been pretty wide, for the first package he sent home contained "five large basaltic columns" from the Giant's Causeway. His visit to Ireland was memorable as including his only real Loch Neagh he skeletonized four old encounter with savages. At the head of donkeys," thereby incurring the displeasure

of the natives, and

"I very nearly had my scalp taken by a mob of wild Irishmen, who came at me with long-handled spades......I was boycotted for an entire day in a cabin, by a mob of nearly

a hundred men, women, females [sic], and children,......while I exercised all the arts of diplomacy I knew to keep the crowd on a peace footing until the arrival of British reinforcements from a police station. I wish I could narrate the whole episode, to show what the festive Home Ruler is capable of on his native bog; but it is too long a story......I am happy to say I came off with whole bones – mine, I mean, not the donkeys'-for they were a complete wreck-after an adventure ten times more dangerous than any I experienced with the head-hunters of Borneo, or any other East Indian natives."

MR. HORNADY does not pretend to much
literary finish or elegance, but his style has
the great practical merit of expressing
clearly and unmistakably what its author
means to say, while narrative and reflection
are alike flavoured throughout with charac-
teristic touches of dry American humour.
Sometimes, too, the writer's intense appre-
ciation of natural beauty leads to the expres-
sion of poetic feeling. But a chatty, dis-
cursive diary of two years of jungle life,
though it makes pleasant reading, requires
condensation. Our author probably, how-
ever, "had not time to make it shorter,"
and the regions described are besides,
than to the English reader. Apart, too,
no doubt, less familiar to the American The writer's sporting experiences in India
were of the usual kind, his pursuit of the
from a certain amount of sameness and wild elephants being, however, more than
repetition, arising from the character of ordinarily dangerous from the comparative
the writer's daily work as a collector and inferiority of the weapons at his disposal.
preserver of animal specimens, the book is His essay on the habits and nature of the
not monotonous nor devoid of incident and elephant is interesting. One characteristic
is not merely a "personal" but a "first- imperfect capacity, under certain circum-
As its author says, it which he brings out very strongly is the
personal" narrative, and the personality of stances, to employ those senses by which
the writer is accordingly not the least
an animal discovers the presence of danger.
attractive feature of the book; for instance, To this peculiarity we are indebted for little
his hearty and unconventional acknowledg-pictures like the following:-
ments of the friendly help he met with from
English officials, sportsmen, and others, and
his appeal-unnecessary, we feel sure to
his own countrymen to requite it in kind.

varied information.

Mr. Hornady visited England on his way to the East, but he did not enjoy London so much as Sarawak. London

"is but a vast inhospitable wilderness of brick,

gloomy but not grand, ancient but not attractive,
redeemed from utter loneliness only by its wonder-
ful museums and galleries of art, and its gardens
of zoology and botany. Not even in the jungles
of India, with only half a dozen native followers,
did I feel so utterly lonely as in the heart of

"Now stand here with me and watch that

lordly old tusker who is coming this way. See how lazily and leisurely he saunters along, swinging his huge trunk from side to side, until he comes clump for a moment with his queer little brown to a thick clump of bamboos. He surveys the eye, and sees in the very centre of it a soft and juicy young shoot, which looks very much like a huge stalk of asparagus, twenty feet high.

Slowly and deliberately he forces his way right into the clump, and reaches inward and upward with his trunk until he gets a turn of it around the coveted young shoot. Now he quickly backs off a few steps, and the twenty-foot stem totters, cracks, and comes down with a tearing crash

Quietly placing his huge forefeet upon the prostrate stem he crushes it into fragments, winds a soft juicy piece of it up to his mouth, and begins a measured champ! champ! champ!' which tells us he is wholly unsuspicious of our pre

sence."

present enormous development. The interest, too, which always attaches to anything in the nature of a spiritual pedigree cannot fail to be awakened in all lovers of Thackeray, that is in all cultivated people, by a closer acquaintance with the man to On a similar occasion the author and a whom the great novelist, eighteen years his native guide remained crouching under a junior, was indebted not only for at least tree surrounded by elephants a few yards one character, but for a good deal of his distant, sniffing the air with their trunks, method, and for many a favourite allusion but unable to discover the position of the and quotation. But apart from such conenemy, whom they would otherwise pro-siderations as these, Maginn cannot fail to bably have charged. This characteristic be in himself an interesting figure. He is has sometimes been considered a proof of the most conspicuous representative, as he is stupidity. In fact, many authorities, Euro- almost the last, of that race of literary swashpean and native, have credited the elephant bucklers, loose living and hard hitting,

with but a mediocre share of intellect-a

In Borneo Mr. Hornady slaughtered-in the interest of science, for they afford but indifferent sport-a number of orang outang, the same excuse covering the rather trea

who flourished in the last and the earlier

years of the present century. It may not
be exactly true, as a too-confiding contem-

view from which Mr. Hornady entirely dis-
sents. On the above occasion, after waiting
a few minutes the party ventured to move,
and found that the herd had entirely dis-porary suggests, to say that in these days
appeared. Unlike the deer or bison when political differences. We suspect that even
appeared. Unlike the deer or bison when literary judgments are never affected by
alarmed,
now there are many good people who, like
"the lordly elephant, largest of all terrestrial the late Mr. Keble, find that their disap-
mammals, glides away like a grey shadow, with-proval of Milton's political views interferes
out breaking a twig, or scraping against a bough. with their enjoyment of 'Paradise Lost';
His foot is like a huge india rubber car-spring, and quite recently an elegant writer has
and is literally shod with silence."
attempted to press the terms "Liberal"
and Conservative" into the service of
poetic criticism. But for the most part, no
doubt, we admit that differences of opinion
may coexist with agreement in taste; and
even when we do forget this, we at least
remember our manners, and abstain from
the cudgel practice which once delighted the
hot youth of Blackwood and the Quarterly,
and now serves as a caution to critics, lest
their names should go down to posterity
linked in an unenviable fashion with that
of a Keats or a Shelley. If Maginn, instead
of drinking himself to death before he was
fifty, had lived out the allotted years of
man, it is probable that he would often
enough have wished to blot the lines in
which he says that Keats wrote indecently,

cherous murder of certain individuals who fell victims to their attempt to protect their younger relatives. In killing these animals he was never troubled by qualms suggested by their resemblance to the human family, for he never, he says, perceived the likeness. Mr. Hornady is not devoid of the instincts of a sportsman; but business is business, and sentimental scruples are weakened by the money value of some of the specimens. The same consideration would, no doubt, lighten the heavy, and in such climates unpleasant labour-often very graphically detailed in these pages-of skinning and "skeletonizing" so many large animals; but "tastes differ, that's all. As for myself, I would not have exchanged the pleasures of that day, when we had those seven orangs to dissect, for a box at the opera the whole season through."

or that the 'Adonais' contains "two sen

tences of pure nonsense out of every three."
Nor is it only the literary critic who may
learn from these remains of Maginn's that
his own likes and dislikes are not neces-
sarily the rule and measure to which all
things are bound to conform or be con-

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

Except that we have few political ryzers that, Russell and Grey having died in their who can rhyme so smoothly nowadays, and beds at a good old age, other names which the reader can easily supply) would have to be substituted, this might easily pass for a recent production. Somehow, the modern reader will think, there has been no very great deterioration, whether in Chur or in judges, since the days of Howley d Eldon; and though several dozen years are passed, our heads are still quite safe on shoulders, and our shoulders even safer fr time. the bully's cane than they were in Magina's

This reminds us that the fam review of Grantley Berkeley's novel, h himself a bullet in or near his boot, is g earned poor Fraser a thrashing, and Magi in these volumes. It is no doubt savage, but considering the character of t victim we are not prepared to endorse it. If Maginn had confined his atta the reprobation that has been bestowed people no more deserving of gentle treat and as well able to defend themselves, ther I would have been but little blemish on hi reputation. Yet there are changes, doubt

The friendly and hospitable behaviour of demned. Simple folks who are apt to both Chinese and Dyaks made his journeys take too seriously the terrible denunciations in the interior of Borneo and his residence of woe pronounced by "anti-Radical" proin the native villages both easy and enjoy-phets upon a backsliding or rather forwardable. These advantages he attributes mainly rushing world may draw a little comfort to the work done by Rajah Brooke and from the knowledge that rather more than his successor, to the value of which he bears fifty years ago similar prognostics were emphatic testimony. But the reader may being framed. Let them hear Maginn on gather from many pleasant and amusing A Dozen Years Hence':passages, the number and variety of which we have perhaps not sufficiently indicated, that the traveller also owes much to his own genial philosophy, and on occasion to his firmness and diplomacy.

Miscellanies, Prose and Verse. By William Maginn. Edited by R. W. Montagu. 2 vols. (Sampson Low & Co.)

It is certainly time that Maginn's writings scattered through early numbers of Blackwood and Fraser should be published in a collected form. If only as one of the early fathers of magazine literature, he deserves some recognition from a generation which has seen that class of literature attain its

[ocr errors]

"Let's drink and be merry,
Dance, sing, and rejoice
So runs the old carol-
"With music and voice."
Had the bard but survived
Till the year thirty-three,
Methinks he 'd have met with
Less matter for glee;
To think what we were

In our days of good sense,
And think what we shall be
A dozen years hence.
Oh! once the wide Continent
Rang with our fame,
And nations grew still

At the sound of our name;
The pride of Old Ocean,

The home of the free,
The scourge of the despot
By land and by sea,

less; though, perhaps, not entirely of th sort which Maginn in his pessimistic mo (as we should call it in our modern jargo foretold-one indeed which in his gloonest anticipated. Gentlene and scholars do not look upon getting drak as one of the ordinary incidents of life. Ne one, for example, who was setting down

forecasts he never

Over

gastronomic and culinary maxims would think it needful to include a piece of adrie to be applied "if you have been tipsy o night." Still less would he, assuming such a contingency, recommend "half a glass of old

Cognac ere you assume the knife and fork at breakfast. Modern readers would hardly

care to be informed what is "the best breakfast dram." The Maxims of O'Doherty' contain sundry shrewd remarks on various subjects; but from the first, which prescribes port, three glasses at dinner; claret, three bottles after," to the hundred and fortysecond, which informs the world that sherry and cold rum punch "may be eternally aried in their application during dinner," hey are pervaded by an aroma of intoxicaion which more than anything else in these olumes gives the measure of the progress if the word may be allowed) which manind has made at least in one direction luring the last fifty years. The oddest thing 3 that Maginn does not seem to have seen

he least objection to this perpetual soaking.
for his scurrility he had flashes of shame.
n one of the admirable Shakspearean
apers which show what he could do in his
aore scholarly moods, he remarks, "The
ask of the satirists appears to me the lowest
a which talent can be employed"; and else-
vhere he shows signs of a perception that
here was a better way in criticism than that
which he adopted. But that sobriety could
e morally, physically, or intellectually ad-
antageous he seems to have had no notion.
Let no man threw away his chances more
or lack of it. If he was not a fine scholar,
e had a wonderful command of several
anguages; and of his powers as a story-
eller the Tales from Blackwood' are a
fitness. It is needless here to recapitulate
he well-known names.
His two Homeric
Ballads of the 'Funeral of Achilles' and
he 'First Appearance of Helen' (from the
dyssey) are admirable; and the rendering
ato English thieves' slang of Vidocq's "En
oulant de vergne en vergne," besides being
tour de force in the matter of rhyme, strikes
is as being a marvellous piece of work.
The rollicking metre in which the picture of
ow crime, with a glimpse of the gallows in
he distance, is set forth, gives a grotesquely
orrible effect which it would be hard to
natch out of Villon. It is too long to give
ntire, and to quote a verse or two would
give no idea of it; besides that, every other
word needs a glossary. So, to part with
Maginn in a pleasant frame, we will quote
his little poem To my Daughters,' which
will incidentally serve to illustrate what we
have said as to the writer's influence on
Thackeray:-

O my darling little daughters!
O my daughters, loved so well!
Who by Brighton's breezy waters
For a time have gone to dwell.
Here I come with spirit yearning,
With your sight my eyes to cheer,
When this sunny day returning
Brings my forty-second year.
Knit to me in love and duty
Have you been, sweet pets of mine!
Long in health and joy and beauty
May it be your lot to shine!
And at last when, God commanding,
I shall leave you both behind,
May I feel, with soul expanding,
I shall leave you good and kind.
May I leave my Nan and Pigeon

Mild of faith, of purpose true,
Full of faith and meek religion,
With many joys and sorrows few!
Now I part with fond caressing,
Part you now, my daughters dear:
Take then, take your father's blessing
In his forty-second year.

The word "faith," by the way, in the second

But the editing of these volumes leaves a
good deal to be desired. We can be pretty
certain, for instance, that Maginn never
wrote, as the second line of an Alcaic stanza,
"Invitat Euhoe! nox est; absit dies," nor
is emendation difficult. Mr. Montagu must
look to these and other things of the same
kind if a second edition is called for.

NOVELS OF THE WEEK.

Par

Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. By John Berwick
Harwood. 3 vols. (Hurst & Blackett.)
Adrian Vidal. By W. E. Norris. 3 vols.
The Bachelor Vicar of Newforth. By Mrs.
(Smith, Elder & Co.)
Irish Pride. By E. Noble. (Bevington & Co.)
Harcourt-Roe. 2 vols. (Fisher Unwin.)
L'Aventure de Mlle. de Saint - Alais.
Henry Rabusson. (Paris, Calmann Lévy.)
MR. HARWOOD deals so largely in the
aristocracy, having previously given us the
history of 'The Tenth Earl,' 'Lord Lynn's
Wife,' and 'Lady Flavia,' that he ought to
be quite an authority on the manners and
customs of the upper crust of society. The
hero of his new story is a wicked baronet,
the accomplice in crime of a very low type
of villain; and that the author considers
him to be a faithful sketch from nature
seems to be proved by the appearance of
his name on the title-page of a story ori-
ginally printed under another title in a
periodical specially intended for family
reading. As a matter of fact, the change
thus effected does Mr. Harwood less than
justice, for his hero is not the wicked
baronet, but an ear!, who surely had a
better claim than bad Sir Robert to occupy
the head-line of four or five hundred pages.
This might be hypercriticism if it were not
that some good purpose may be served by
expressing a doubt as to the value of im-
probable and un-lifelike fables about the
aristocracy manifestly written with little
knowledge of any special characteristics
displayed by them as a class. No service-
able ideas on the subject can be conveyed
by such stories as 'Sir Robert Shirley, Bart.,'
whether to family readers or to any one else,
and the talent of an author for pleasant
homely romance would be employed to
greater advantage on themes of every day
average life than in dwelling on the low
villainies and heroic virtues of men and
women of title.

'Adrian Vidal' is one of Mr. Norris's
more successful works. It misses something
of the charm which the Algerian scenery
gave to 'Mademoiselle de Mersac'; but it
is better arranged and more complete than
most of Mr. Norris's works. His real
weakness lies in his gift of pleasantness.
He is apt to be diffuse, and his diffuseness
is so agreeable and so persuasive that one
is led away imperceptibly from the thread
of the story, and finds it hard to admit the
fault which ought to be condemned. Mr.
Norris certainly might do better than he
has done-of that he is no doubt aware.
He should try to compress his matter and
face the difficulty of filling three volumes.
If he were to cut down his pleasing digres-
sions what should he put instead? If he
could solve that problem he would take a
high place among living novelists.

Under a cumbrous title Mrs. Harcourt

line Roe has again taken a clergyman's trials for

her theme. Two-thirds of the story are outlined in a prologue, which, though only a page long, is calculated to discount a good deal of the reader's interest.

If the hero does not

altogether succeed in attracting sympathy, it is not because he lacks, but because he is rather overcharged with heroic qualities. The Rev. Theophilus Manley is an overdrawn personage, and the situations for the display of his numerous virtues are somewhat clumsily contrived. To bring the heroine into contact with him she is knocked down by a cart; as a prelude to their final reconciliation she stumbles, falls against places his hat under her hair until she some rocks, and faints, whereupon the vicar of romance, it must be admitted that she has revives. But if the writer fails in the region a very agreeable and natural way of describing the doings and sayings of society in an English seaport. Provincial angularities come in for some good-humoured satire, and several types of the genus naval officer are drawn to the life. The author's leanings are evidently not altogether towards the new school, for she speaks with implied regret of the time when "the polished, somewhat cynical, aesthetic, learned, ironclad type of officer" had not yet come into existence. The courtship of Lieut. Campbell-a good representative of modern nonchalance-and its humiliating termination is an amusing episode, carried through with perfect consistency, and shows the author at her best. But the whole story is bright and readable, and correctly reproduces many of the lighter phases of modern society without degenerating into flippancy.

It is difficult to imagine what could have induced the author of 'Irish Pride' to supplement that title with the explanatory addition "an unsocial tale of social life," seeing that what little merit the book possesses consists of the sketches of the

Dublin

frivolous side of Irish character as exhibited
in third-rate provincial and metropolitan
society. It is impossible to feel any respect
or sympathy for the few personages we are
obviously intended to admire, so helplessly
submissive are they to the rampant vulgarity
of their friends and relations.
society as pictured by this writer is the
reverse of attractive, and its belles are re-
presented as relying mainly on foreign
cosmetics and native impertinence.
style in which 'Irish Pride' is written is
extraordinarily bad. A new-comer is spoken
of seriously as "the latest addenda"; "to
addend" is used in the sense of to add, and

[ocr errors]

The

evanescent " in some sense that we have failed to fathom. As specimens of the author's taste in names we may mention Lady Monia Cottonopolis and Mr. Astutor, a solicitor.

The excellent promise of 'Madame de Givré' and 'Le Roman d'un Fataliste' is well sustained in 'L'Aventure de Mlle. de Saint-Alais.' The plot would scandalize a Frenchman of the old school, for the very reason that there is nothing really scandalous about it. Edmée de Saint-Alais is the beautiful daughter of impoverished parents, who have been accustomed to associating on equal terms with the wealthiest as well as the most select society of the Empire. She is still welcomed by this society, but unfortunately no longer possesses the dowry which alone could ensure her an honour

« ZurückWeiter »