SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1895. CONTENTS. TSBURY'S SPECIMENS OF ENGLISH PROSE TON'S LIFE OF EDWARD CECIL... ADY'S EXPERIENCES IN THE JUNGLE INN'S MISCELLANIES ELS OF THE WEEK ... ... STMAS BOOKS ARY TABLE-LIST OF NEW BOOKS 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 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 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 and as little of that of Wordsworth; there are If we will, we may hear him admit that, 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, * Bounding, or with a tiger's leap. The kingdom is not large, or else no flesh would it would sound well in Drayton's 'Polyol- 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 Life and Times of General Sir Edward_Cecil, Ir to the facts stated on the title-page of 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 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- rors of continental warfare. And when 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 A book that has been to the writer a Two Years in the Jungle: the Experiences of the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. By 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 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, "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 view from which Mr. Hornady entirely dis- 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." 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 "Let's drink and be merry, In our days of good sense, At the sound of our name; The home of the free, 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. O my darling little daughters! Mild of faith, of purpose true, The word "faith," by the way, in the second But the editing of these volumes leaves a NOVELS OF THE WEEK. Par Sir Robert Shirley, Bart. By John Berwick 'Adrian Vidal' is one of Mr. Norris's 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 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 |