BOOKS.

DOWDEN'S STUDIES IN LITERATURE.*

To attempt to dissect criticisms which are not in themselves of surpassing interest and excellence is a work of supererogation. It would be wrong to describe Mr. Dowden's Studies in Literature as rising above meritorious mediocrity, and we do not purpose there- fore to examine them minutely. But the author of the excellent Critical Study of the Mind and Art of Sliakspeare, which has already, we are glad to see, reached a third edition, and of the superlatively excellent Shakspeare Primer, which will soon, if we mistake not, reach, as it deserves, a thirtieth, is not a man to be treated cavalierly. He has chosen to collect and reprint a number of ephemeral specimens of what an ill-natured critic would

call " padding," but we are not inclined to be unduly severe upon him for doing so. In the world of readers there are many appetites, and the stomach which rejects strong meat may batten quite con-

tentedly on a diet of milk and whey. If, continuing the metaphor, we were to describe the pabulum which Mr. Dowden sets before us by a single epithet, we should call it "gelatinous." In military parlance, it is often, very often, soft to the touch. Mr. Dowden says

modestly enough that in reading over his proof sheets he has pro- bably felt the imperfection of his attempts at criticism as vividly as any other person is likely to feel it. If this be so, we are sorry indeed for the pain which Mr. Dowden must have experienced, but it does not seem very easy to reconcile this humble admission with the rest of the preface from which it is taken. It would not be courteous to insist upon this discrepancy, so we shall content ourselves with pointing out one or two points where we venture to differ from Mr. Dowden, and one or two of those blunders which are to the reviewer what the sight of Sackerson was to Master Slender.

And first of the first. Mr. Dowden expresses great admiration for what he calls "large rues d'ensemble." Now we dislike this phrase very much, and distrust it still more. We are heart and soul, tooth and tail, semper et ubique for the concrete. But in justice to Mr. Dowden, and in justice, we may add, to ourselves, we will quote at length one of these so-called rues d'ensemble :- " Tho vaster geological periods have made the period of human existence on the globe—vast as that is—seem of short duration. What is remote becomes near. Wo do not now waste our hearts in regret for an imaginary age of gold ; we find a genuine pathos in the hard, rude lives, the narrow bounds of knowledge, the primitive desires, the un- developed awes and fears and shames of our remote ancestors, who, by their aspiring effort, shaped for us our fortunes. We almost join hands with them across the centuries. The ripples have hardly yet left the lake whore some dweller upon piles dropped his stone hatchet. The fire in the troglodyte's cave is not quite extinct. We hear the hiss in the milk-pail of some Aryan daughter, who may perhaps have had a curious likeness to our grandmother by Oainsborongh. Wo still repeat • Studies in Literature, 1789-1877. By Edward Dowden. London: C. Kagan Paul and Co. 1878. the words of that perplexed progenitor mholearned in dreams that his dead chieftain was not all extinct, nor have we yet satisfactorily solved his puzzle. When we it in summer, in a glare that bewilders the brain, beside the bathing-machines, and watch the children in knicker- bockers and tunics engaged with their primitive architecture, which the next tide will wash away, we fall into a half-dream, and wake in alarm lest a horde of lean and fierce-eyed men and women may suddenly rush shorewards for their gorge of shell-fish, and in their orgasm of hunger may but too gladly lick up and swallow our babies. Forlorn and much-tried progenitors, wild human scare-crows on our bleak northern shores, we are no undutiful sons ! we acknowledge our kinship ; in your craving for an unattainable oyster, we recognise our own passion for the ideal; and in your torpid sullenness when only shells were found, our own keener Welt-Sehmerz and philosophies of despair."

We do not suppose that Mr. Dowden would call this an un- fairly chosen specimen of his style of thought and expression.

We have taken it almost at random from the volume before us, and the reader who does not think, as we do, that it is mere gossamer twaddle, which a man of Mr. Dowden's ability could find no possible difficulty in spinning by the square mile, will certainly be charmed by many a companion web of similar texture, exhibited in these Studies in Literature. We take no pleasure in such flimsy Imes d'ensemble ourselves, and are careless about pick- ing them to pieces. But one little service which these " views " may do for the reader who is not disposed to admire them is this,— they will thoroughly put him on his guard against Mr. Dowden's estimate, for instance, of Walt Whitman. We have already implied, and we now state categorically, that we look upon Mr. Dowden as a man of real ability, and a man whom it would be silly and presumptuous for us to pretend to treat de haul cn has. But none the less, we must persistently assert that throughout this volume we have been annoyed and disconcerted by page after page of inconsequent thinking and misty generalisation. We attri- bute this to the haste with which Mr. Dowden, as we think, must have dashed off these improvisations ; but after all, it does not matter to what we attribute it. The fact remains that we feel quite unmoved by Mr. Dowden's flowery declama- tions, and in the case of Walt Whitman, Mr. Dowden must thank himself, if some portion of the contempt which we have no hesi- tation whatever in expressing for that shallow and bumptious writer, must inevitably seem to recoil on his own exaggerated laudation of an author who is our special aversion. We have obviously no room, here and now, to say our say about this Yankee charlatan, but what would Cobbett, who really did know something about the value of simplicity in writing, have said to this trash, which Mr. Dowden quotes with admiration ?—

" The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity. Nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. [True, but mark what follows?] To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of hoes in the woods, and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of ' art.'"

Now of two things, one,—either we do not appreciate, or Mr. Dowden does not appreciate, the difference between simplicity and simple nonsense ; but space failing us, we must appeal to the reader to judge between us, and can say no more.

Perhaps if we were to go against our own principles, and attempt to give a rue d'ensemble of Studies in Literature, we might say that they bring before us Mr. Dowden under the influence of the writers whom he is studying much more than they bring before us the writers themselves. We do not press this view, of course, at all closely, but any one who reads Mr. Do wden's " gush "about George Eliot will see what we mean. It is strange indeed that one who can write so sensibly about Shakespeare should write so wildly about a lady who is no doubt much the cleverest woman who ever wrote, but in point of genius, is hardly worthy to unloose the latchet of Shakespeare's shoe. Nevertheless, George Eliot's writings seem to affect Mr. Dowden as beef affected Sir Andrew Aguecheek,—but we are losing sight of our vue d'ensemble, and are almost sorry that we ever took it.

Of the specific blunders that we have to lay to Mr. Dowden's charge we have left ourselves but little room to speak. The following is, perhaps, the most amusing of these slips. Mr. Dowden is speaking of Ebenezer Elliott, and he says of him that " he does not, like that tender-souled lyrist of Revolution in France, Pierre Dupont, confess the deep comradeship which binds his life to,—

" Les Brands hceufs blancs, marques de roux."

Now, surely, Dupont confesses nothing of the kind. His capital song, "Les Bceufs," does indeed express, with some exaggeration, a French peasant's love for his pair of oxen. But how can we identify the Socialist poet himself with the farmer whom he is quizzing good-humouredly? Or if we do, how can we reconcile the epithet " tender-souled " with the famous refrain of that famous ditty ?-

" J'aime Jeanne, ma female. Eh bien ! raimorais miens La voir mourir, quo voir mourir mes bents."

Again, to call the first half of Goethe's Faust the unintelligible half strikes us as very strange indeed. There are difficulties in the first part of Faust, no doubt, but it seems to be very plain sailing indeed, compared to the second and immeasurably inferior part. We doubt, too, very much whether it is right to speak of the style of the Two Gentlemen of Verona as "limp and languid." This is going a great deal too far, and would be unpardonable in a writer whose own style was much less limp and much less lan- guid than Mr. Dowden's. And it is certainly putting the case a great deal too mildly, to say that Shelley complained that Words- worth did not possess imagination in the highest sense of that word, when what Shelley did really say was that Wordsworth "had no more imagination than a pint-pot." But enough of this carping. We can recommend these Studies in Literature to any one who can read them with ease and pleasure, but we must honestly confess that we found it impossible to do so ourselves.