MR. WATSON'S ESSAYS.*

THERE are one or two of these "excursions" which are hardly worthy of preservation in their present form,—for example, the attack on Mr. Buxton Forman (with the drift of which we heartily agree) for disinterring all the worthless fragments of literary effort which Keats had cast away as mere preludings to his great poems,—an essay which Mr. Watson terms "The Punishment of Genius ;" again, the very thin essay on Mr. Colvin's study of Keats ; and the genial article on one of the editors of this journal,—very far from the more important of them,—a subject which it hardly lay in Mr. Watson's purely literary field of labour to deal with adequately. The greater qualities of journalists are not literary, but political; and in the political field, large historical knowledge and high political imagination are far the most essential of the journalist's gifts, and are gifts to which the subject of Mr. Watson's genial essay has no pre- tension. We think the volume would have been more worthy of his critical genius if these little and not very substantial essays had been omitted ; for almost all the others, though many of them arc very brief, have some fine touches in them which make them not only valuable, but delightful. The first essay, on the immense gulf between Shakespeare and all the other Elizabethan dramatists who have been of late so unduly panegyrised, is full of subtle and delicate, no less than of broad and sound, criticism ; and criticism expressed with that purity and distinction which marks the pen of almost every true poet. We wonder somewhat that, in the admirable essay on style, Mr. Watson, while extolling Milton's poetic style as the very perfection of majesty and music, made no comment on the turgid, violent, and of ten pedagogic inflation of some of that great poet's controversial prose. Nothing could have better illustrated Mr. Watson's criticism of Mr. Lowell's mistake in asserting that " mannerism is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious abnegation," than Milton's style as well in prose as in verse. In neither the one nor the other is there the "unconscious abnegation of self," and in the prose at least, there is often the wilful obtrusion of self; nay, we venture to say that, in some of the very finest passages of his verse, there is much more than a trace of the same characteristic. The address to light, for instance, in the opening of the third book of Paradise Lost, is full of the obtrusion of self ; and very sublime Milton makes that

obtrusiion

"Thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sovran vital lamp, but thou Revisit st not those eyes, that roll in vain To find thy piercing rays, and find no dawn. So thick a drop serene 'lath quench'd their orbs Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear spring or shady grove or sunny hill Smit with the love of sacred song.''

No one could maintain that any "unconscious abnegation" of self marks that majestic passage. We venture to say

* Excursions is Criticism: beim some Prow nly.ation, of a Eleynisr. By William Watson. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

that the very same dominant personality of feeling which makes Milton's style in verse so majestic, when he expresses it with the dignified reserve of one who was conscious of the restraints and the responsibilities of the higher imaginative life, makes his style in prose frequently overbearing and didactic to a degree which even the pomp of his imagination and the largeness of his intellectual grasp failed to keep in any adequate restraint. The same personality which, within the bounds of stately verse, conveys the impression of sublimity, is found to be oppressive and redundant when the poet launches himself into the too congenial work of either asserting himself, or vituperating his foes. The very same proud self-consciousness Which makes the noblest of styles when it is submitted to the high restraints of a solemn rhythm and a gracious harmony, rushes upon us with an engrossing and pedantic violence when it simply expresses an overweening egotism and a turbid disdain. It is just the same with Carlyle, who could write with a strange and pathetic music when he was really moved, as in the celebrated passage in which he closes his Life of Sterling, describing him as "a brilliant human presence, distinguishable, honourable, and lovable amid the dim common Populations ; among the million little beautiful, once more a beautiful human soul, whom I, among others, recognised and lovingly walked with, while the years and the hours were," but Who could also write a style as affected as it was redundant when be simply strove to say a commonplace thing in a grotesque and attitudinising way, as for instance, in introducing Emerson to the English public : "The words of such a man, what words he thinks fit to speak, are worth attending to," As Mr. Watson says, a great style must impress you as that of a mind "that nothing common does or mean ; " but the very same mind which so impresses you in its higher moods, impresses you often with its wilfulness and overbearingness in its lower moods; and so it gives the unmistakable ring of a great style to its utterance at one time, and the excessive self-consciousness of an arrogant and theatric mannerism at another. It is true, too, that some of the very greatest styles are suffused with the sense of personality, like Milton's style in verse, Bacon's in prose, Johnson's occasionally only,—when his heart as well as his intellect was touched,—in both prose and verse, and the style of Aschylus in all that remains of his great dramas ; while other even greater styles are great more by their impersonal lucidity and clear reflection of the object of thought, as, for instance, the styles of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and, in our own day, Ruskin and Newman.

But this difference results from the fact that there are some great minds which charm us chiefly by the grandeur of their self-consciousness, and some which charm us chiefly by the clearness of their vision. Mr. Watson's own style is a style that often approaches greatness, and greatness of the latter kind,—greatness in the clearness and singleness of its vision. The style of his ode on the Shelley centenary, for instance, is truly great, and the style of his prose is often so. Take the following as an example :—

"Enough, however, has been said. Lot us take leave of Shakespeare's dramatic contemporaries and immediate' successors With a hearty recognition of one great though extrinsic merit common to them all. They are not gulfs or estuaries of his ocean, but they stand towards him in one very serviceable relation, they are his finest imaginable foils. If we live under the shadow of the Andes, a time comes when their immensity ceases to be a PerPntual astonishment to us. But if Skiddaw and Helvellyn could suddenly be placed in the foreground, we should experience a renewed sensation of the vastness of Chimborazo and Aconcagua. If any reader is so unfortunate as to find that a prolonged familiarity with Shakespeare begets at last a somewhat blunted sensibility to the master's supreme power, a remedy is at hand by which his palate may recover its gust. La him try a course

.Of Webster and Dekker, Randolph and Tourneur, Middleton and Heywood and Ford."

We are not very fond of imaginary conversations with the dead, for in order to be effective, they must always imply that the immortal is as narrow and as much beset by the vices of his mortal temperament as he was when on earth, and we can hardly imagine Dr. Johnson, for instance, as having read and entered into all the literature of the nineteenth century with- out having absorbed some of its spirit and modified greatly

his own view of what literature should be. But granting the very

necessary, but also very disputable, axiom that Dr.

Johnson, in what Mr. Watson calls "the Elysian fields," —a phrase which is, as Mr. Pecksniff puts it, "pagan, I regret to say,"—is just what Dr. Johnson was in Bolt Court or at Streatham, it is hard to imagine any happier reproduction of his sententious style than that which Mr. Watson gives us in his final essay. The following criticism, for instance, of one of Rossetti's much over-praised sonnets is, on the whole, hardly to be called hyper-criticism. The censure is, perhaps, a little exaggerated, but it is essentially sound :—

"JOHNSON. As to Rossetti, though I remember the having read him, I found in him but little that pleased. INT. He certainly had what you praise Tennyson for—pre- cision in luxuriance. For romantic richness of colour I believe him to be without an equal, and along with this gorgeous affluence he has the strictest verbal compression. He valued himself upon his turn for condensation—rightly, I think.

Here Dr. Johnson takes down from his shelves Rossetti's Poems, opens at random, and reads aloud as follows

Like labour-laden mooncloutls faint to flee

Prom winds that sweep the winter.bitten void—

Like multiform circa:nil uonoo manifold

Of night's flood-tido—ilke terrors that agree Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea—

Even such, within some trims dimmed by our breath, Our beans discern wild images of death, Bliad.isvi and shoals that edge eternity. Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove

Sweeter to g ide around, to brood above.

Tell me, my heart, what angel-greeted door Or threshold of wing-wiunowed threshing-floor Hi.th guest fire-fledged Hs thine, whose lord is Love?'

Sir, I know not but you are right to claim for Rossetti's verse the. merit of condensation. Here is truly a greater body of nonsense condensed within fourteen lines than I had believed fourteen lines to be caps clone of. Now' sir, I invite you to consider with me this sonnet line by line. Let us begin at the beginning. Clouds are often enough spoken of as labouring : and clouds may also, with permissible looseness, be said to be laden, as with rain ; but how can they be labour-laden, that is, laden with labour P And what is a mooncloud ? And what does faint to flee mean ? Cireum- fluenee of night's flood-tide is inoffensive, but multiform and mani- fold have hero little, if any, meaning, and of use none whatever, save to swell out a line. In terrors that agree of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea, I know not what agreement is to be understood. In line six, the words within some glass dimmed by our breath eon only be held to verge towards a possible meaning by being charitably supposed figurative ; but figurative of what does not appear. Shadows and shoals are brought together for no better reason than their initial alliteration ; a reason, however, which appears to have much weight with ElOr00 of your modern poets. Howbeit is an odd and uncouth word, by which good taste is revolted. Expletives like cloth were in my time, by common con- sent of the judicious, rejected as awkward encumbrances, and I am sorry to see them come in after our diction had been supposed purged of them. In lines nine to eleven, a Power sweeter to glide around and to brood above than either the flow of a stream or the flight of a dove is, soars against the imminent shade of death. It were vain to discuss these lines in hope to come at their meaning. They have none. The three lines which follow, and in which we meet with the guest of the threshold of a thresh- ing-floor, are equally vacant of import. Pope speaks of writers who blunder round about a meaning' To blunder round about a meaning is bad enough, but it at least implies a meaning round about which the writer blunders ; and when wo see an author in manifest labour and travail with a thought, compassion for his pangs disposes us to assist at the delivery. We are willing to believe that the value of the thought may compensate its difficult bringing forth. But this is not Rossetti's plight. It is not that he is here painfully struggling to present us with a thought. He had no thought to present. Your contemporaries, I presume, called this poetry. Mine would have called it gibberish.'

Amongst the most interesting of these little essays is that on Waugh, the Lancashire Laureate, as Mr. Watson calls him, a subject to which Mr. Watson brings not only his fine critical faculty, but an unusual familiarity with the provincial speech and thought of Lancashire. There is an impressive essay,

too, on Mr. Ha,rdy's singularly powerful but repulsive story, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, though we do not agree with either its author's or Mr. Watson's estimate of the heroine, and regard the hero with the most profound dislike and even contempt. Mr. Hardy, in his indignation against society, falls foul, as Mr. Watson says, of Nature and the whole structure of the universe. But Mr. Watson's profound admiration for the great power of the book, which is justifiable, somehow manages to obscure his insight into its great moral

flaws and blots.