HANNAY'S ESSAYS FROM T1TE 'QUARTERLY."*
WE are not inclined to join in the objections urged by some of our critical brethren, againit the practice of republishing articles from the periodicals. No doubt this -honour is frequently conferred on a great quantity of rubbish, the worthlessness of which, when brought together naturally becomes apparent enough to provoke the petu- lance of those who have to read and pass an opinion on what they took care to skip in its original form. But as such volumes usually die a natural death, the general public cannot be said to be hurt by them, and for the reviewers, who chiefly complain, they do not seem to be worse than any other ineffective books, the proportion of which to every "library table" is doubtless determined by averages like those which obtain in graver matters. On the whole, we think we gain more than we lose by the practice in question. It has decidedly improved the magazines and reviews, for even the writers who have no expectation of a reappearance are raised in tone by contact with those who confidently look forward to one. The latter, it is obvious to remark, are induced to bestow more trouble on what may one day come out with their name, while the necessity of patting their thoughts in a tolerably popular form, and of meeting the views of an editor, is some guarantee against the desultoriness and crot- chetiness which too often mark independent works. At any rate the non-existence of the practice would have deprived us of some very agreable and valuable additions to our literature, among which, not the least agreable and valuable we think, is to be ranked the volume now before us.
It contains nine essays,—on " Table-Talk"—" British Family His- tories"—" English Political Satires"—"Electioneering"—the "His- toric Peerage of England"—" Admiral Blake"—" Horace and his Translators"—the "Minstrelsy. of Scotland," and "Literary Biogra- phy," apropos of Burgon's "Life of Tytler." We recollect reading all these with much interest as they appeared, and we are very glad to have the opportunity of looking at them together, as the most consi- derable production of an author whose Lectures on "Satire and Sa- tirists," in our opinion, show far higher powers than the novels by which he is more popularly known. It will strike the least observant reader that the subjects we have enumerated are somehow quite dif- ferent in character to those which usually form the contents of similar republications. The topics are scarcely popular ones ; we recognize no "question of the day," and there are none of the "studies" of standard authors, or estimates of more recently celebrated works, such as most men select for treatment in reviews. On the other hand, they are clearly not of the mere bookworm order, and any one who looks into them will at once perceive that the dryasdust element of a subject is precisely that which Mr. Hannay takes care to leave on the top shelf where he finds it. Various, however, as they may seem to be, and extensive as is the information they embrace, they ha-se a community of character which shows that the mind of their author is not a desultory one, bat has a decided bent, which is kept more or less consciously in view through almost everything he writes. His strength is in History; not constitutional, nor Panoramic, nor antiquarian history, but history on its personal, social, and biographic side, as exhibited in the life and conver- sation of celebrated men, in the records of their race, in their contests for power, in their hereditary capacities or their warlike achievements ; or in the poetic and literary aspect of the same men, things, and qualities. He may be called a hero-worshipper on the side of genealogy and fact, and his power may be said chiefly to lie in pre- senting such views in a popular form, while his tastes faithfully point in the same direction, being almost entirely with the past, but including the classical ages, as well as the bygone times and feelings of our own Country. There is no want of appreciation of modern historical literary ideas, and few things are likely to strike a reader more for- * Essays/rem "The Quarterly Review." By James Hannay. Hurst and Blackett.
eibly in these essays than the precision with which such ideas are seized, and the neatness with which they are worked into the tex- ture of the writing. But the school of historical sympathies to which Mr. Hannay belongs is that of Scott, not of Macaulay, still less this t of Mr. Charles Knight or Mr. Buckle. "Hero-worship" is not, pe haps, an entirely adequate way of expressing Mr. Hannay's politics creed, bat it conveys, better than any other single phrase could do, the kind of conservatism he believes in, which is not of the abstrac or philosophical kind such as might be evolved from the study of Burke, De Tocqueville, and Coleridge, but rather a matter of senti- ment and loyalty, based on the concrete instances which connect national glory with individual greatness. Feudalism, in its strict his- toric and genealogic aspect, is discussed in the essay on the Historic Peerage, which we are inclined to consider the most important article in this_ volume. It presents a view of the progress of the British Peerage from the time of the Conquest, its epochs and its changes, and the manner in which it has been affected by other social influences, in a shorter compass and a better form than anything on the same subject which we know of elsewhere. The picturesque side of these ideas is well set forth in the following extracts from the same paper, which we quote, not only for their own merit, but as giving a tolerably complete view of Mr. Hannay's creed on such matters :
"A certain love of pleasure and pomp—a certain not ungraceful ostentation--
seems to ruffle, like a plume in the cap of the men of Edward days. Feu- dalism had flowered, so to speak, and was enjoying itself in the sunshine of its prosperity, with all its heraldic banners flattering in the breeze. The earlier barons, not less noble, had been, perhaps, a shade more grim; and, in coming from earlier writers to Froissart, we feel—is it the wine they are drinking, or the love-songs they are singing? or a haunting thought of the eyes of the Countess of Salisbury ?—that we are two or three generations nearer the cavaliers."
After giving the clause in the Earl of Salisbury's will (1397) directing the ceremonies to be used at his funeral, he says :
"We quote this to illustrate the love of ceremony and display belonging to those ages, and giving them that picturesque air which fills Froissart's pages like a coloured light. It was one of the Beanchamps that first ordered that a horse completely harnessed with all its military- caparisons, should 'proceed before his corps.' In fart, feudalism was poetic. It; had' for all the grave occasions of life a corresponding symbolism' which served to the people as an image of the moral truth in each. Hence, feudalism formed the manners of Europe, and habituated the popular mind to reverence and admiration. A noble of those days, the highest type of the manhood of the country, was in himself a kind of education, not only for the youths who lived about him, expressly that they might study him in that light, but for the general people who saw him constantly, and regarded him as a species of ideal. It is no small compliment to English feudalism to say that it contributed to the national education so powerful a moral influ- ence: and ourfirst gratitude (far this as for all other traditions of the kind) is due to the old aristocracy, the original blood, whose history is thus a matter of national concern."
This essay furnishes, also, a valuable correction to popular views of history on the question of the real effect of the wars of the Roses on the peerage generally as it exists now, which has been stated in a way to mislead, both by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Disraeli. The social side of the same ideas is presented in the essay on British Family Histories, which reviews two or three of the best of the older specimens of this sort, with a glance at modern attempts in the same direction, and shows how personal details, and that local colour which helps na to realize the life of our forefathers, are em- bodied in such records for those who have the diligence to seek them. The purely poetic aspect of the feudal world is exhibited in the article on the Minstrelsy of Scotland, while the personal qualities which made men famous of old are illustrated in a rather more peaceful, though still stirring phase of their development, by those on English Political Satires and Electioneering. The most purely literary articles are those on Table-talk, on Blake, on Horace, and on Literary Biography, but in these, too, an attentive reader will easily trace the same spirit as we have attributed to the others.
As a writer, in the literary sense—that is, as one who expresses views, in a certain style, on subordinate points, and apart from the general cast of his tastes, opinions, and tone of mind—Mr. Hannay possesses very remarkable merit indeed. He is eminently readable; he has a vast deal of shrewd common sense; and, lastly, a brilliancy of illustrative comparison quite unparalleled by any author of the present day. He has carried the art of writing lightly and easily on serious topics, without flippancy, to a most successful pitch, and we could not point to any series of articles, not even excepting those of Macaulay, which are easier reading. Questions of historical and genealogical evidence are, of course, things apart, and they do not appeal to the same kind of readers as those who will be delighted with the good things of some of the other papers, but we feel that in some other hands such materials would have proved unendurably tiresome. The common sense nature of his views is well exemplified by his treatment of such questions as occur in respect to the chrono- logy and the genuineness of Horace's Odes, and probably most of those to whom his ideas on the subject are new will be disposed to accept them without further investigation. The same quality of mind is shown in his seizing on the true point of interest about the ancient ballads : "Though there is plenty to be said in the way of criticism proper, . . . the interest attached to the fact that they elite takes precedence of the interest which belongs to showing what their beauties are." The essence of the question as to whether a ballad is modern or not is treated with equal simplicity and clearness. In the paper on Literary Biography (in which be attacks the common belief that the life of a man of letters must necessarily make a dull narra- tive) the same quality of mind is evidenced by the suggestive ques- tion, "How came an uninteresting person to write an interesting book ?"—a problem which he does not, indeed, attempt to solve, bat to have proposed which shows an unusual freshness of mind and freedom from conventional ways of thinking on such topics. Most certainly, however, the characteristic by which Mr. Hannay will be most widely and popularly known is the felicity and fertility of his illustrations, which recal sometimes the similes of Moore, some- times the images of Burke, and only fail of being witticisms because they are too apt and pertinent to be facetious. We scarcely open a page without lighting on some sparkling observation. For example, he says "the present age requires a light literature with a value in it, like that of the paper boat which Shelley launched on the Ser- pentine, and which was made of a fifty-pound Bank of England bill." Table-talk, he elsewhere says, should not want wit, but should not have too much ; the epigrams ought to be "sprinkled over it .with the natural grace of daisies on a meadow." Luther's rich and deep sayings he calls "illuminated thoughts ;" and in speaking of the ana of the age of Louis XIV. he says, "the words which were the counters at his court were as choice as the counters they used at cards. It was as if diamonds had been declared a legal tender." Of Seldeu's wit, which was not inferior to his learning, he says, "the eiviiptopov yAaoita is on the sea of his vast intellect," and of wit, in its proper relation to conversation, that "a good bon mot, like the sparkle from a grindstone, is the casual brilliance of an intellect in fruitful activity." In arguing that satire is one of the oldest things in the world, he has no doubt that "men learned to knock wit out of a dunce almost as soon as to knock fire out of a flint." This, too, is good; "We only half relish our progenitors' sarcasms,. because we do not feel their passions : what to them were burning, meteors, which they admired as they flew, we have to seek on the ground as cold meteoric stones." Of moore's satire, he says "his ornaments do not encumber his weapon; nay, he wounds more severely by the aid of them, like a man striking with his fist when he has his rings on." In the article on Admiral Blake there is a para- graph of imaginative feeling very gracefully expressed : "A generous man of our days may muse not without tenderness on the decline of that great naval power which once threatened, tested, nay punished us from the coasts of Holland. The Dutch, akin to us in blood, in language, in institu lions, tried our supremacy more severely than any other nation we have ever encountered. They, too, were not merely brave meu, who could build ships and fight upon the water, but seamen essentially., like ourselves. But their day went by, and now their naval power seems typified in their strange and quaint yet poetic sea-myth. It beats about the shores of history like a phantom ship,— stately and melancholy, a spectre of the past,—and will never enter the real world of flesh and blood any more.'
The essay on Horace and his Translators is full of similar passages, with many of those images which it would be unjust to call concern, which seem to spring up naturally on whatever subject Mr. Hannay takes up—and which are much better in their places, clenching the arguments and enlivening the style, than can be conceived by those who merely see them separately quoted. In speaking of the obli- gations of Horace to Greek models, he says that some of the best- known odes have rather the air of exercises about them—" they are clear and sweet as the finest honey, but the honey tastes of the flowers of Hymettus"—and we do not mind meeting nearly a repeti- tion of the same thought in the Essay on the Minstrelsy of Scotland, where he says that the songs of the country "embalm her nationality, as the honey of the north tastes of heather." Nothing can be better, too, than his comparison of the vitality of the old ballads—whose re- publication by Percy so powerfully affected the age of Scott, Words- worth, and Coleridge—to the seeds in mummies, which are still ready to sprout, after their long hybemation. But the best thing of this sort in the volume, and in fact one of the neatest things of the kind we have ever met with anywhere, is his remark on Darwin's "Loves of the Plants," in connexion with the well-known parody in the "Anti-Jacobin;" "Darwin's case is peculiar: other poems live in spite of ridicule, and his in consequence of it. The Attic salt of his enemies has preserved his reputation." On the other hand, there is a danger attending this brilliant faculty—that of leading a writer to make a remark merely because it is susceptible of a witty illustra- tion, a habit which may lead to some inconsistency. Thus, we think the comparison of a translation like Mr. Newman's to "a photograph of a corpse," good as it is by itself, requires more harmonizing than it has received with the concluding paragraph of the essay, where a warning is given against taking liberties and overlooking details, and "an infusion of Pre-Raplutelitism" is recommended. We do not know whether Mr. Hammy's views on art are of the school of Millais and Rossetti, or not, but it would obviously be just as easy to con- demn Mr. Newman by saying that his translation was "a piece of Pre-Raphaelitism."
Mr. Hannay does not seem to have found reason to alter or add to any of his essays, and indeed there is a Scotch completeness about them which generally leaves nothing more to be said. They are not, however, so argumentative as is usually the case with trans-Tweedian reviewers. They are rather expositions of views which you may take and absorb, if they suit you—if not, you may let them alone. This is especially the case with the ideas on Feudalism and on Scholarship, and the genial theory of life, each of which is very prominent in these pages. The appeal is to a reader's nature and character, rather than to his logical faculty; so that the latter quality, if absent, is not de- siderated. We should except, perhaps, the close of the paper on Table-talk, where the deficiency of conversation at the present day is not adequately accounted for, and the point is worth fuller considera- tion than Mr. Hannay has given it.
We hope the collection of these essays does not imply that their author's present occupations are likely to prevent his continuing to contribute to the Quarterly. His scholarship, his geniality, his brilliancy of style, and his tendency to take up subjects likely to fail in most other hands, would make his absence from periodical liters-
' use a thing much to be regretted. But, even if he does not reappear as a Censor Trimestris, we hope some day to see an enlarged edition of his "Satire and Satirists"—a field of research cognate to the sub- jects of many of these essays, and offering an excellent opportunity for the display of Mr. Hannay's soundest and most agreeable literary' qualifications.
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