MR. DA.WSON'S ESSAYS.*
PEOPLE who are well on in middle age will remember some- thing of the name and fame of the Rev. George Gilfillan. He was a mighty hunter after new poets, and his season seemed to be a good one for sport, as he seldom brought home am empty bag. True, his luck was unequal ; sometimes be knocked over a Sydney Dobell, and again he had to content himself with such small deer as a Stanyan Bigg ; but there was always something, and so the hunter lived in great con- tent. When the new poets were bagged, the hunter wrote essays about them of fearful and wonderful eloquence ; when * Quest and Vision Essays in Life and .Literaturs, By W, J. DDIVE011. London : Hodder and Stoughton. the stock of new poets ran low, he turned to the old ones, and wrote essays about them ; and when no poet, either new or old, was at the moment available, the essayist did not disdain to make a proseman the theme of his tempestuous rhetoric. Mr. Gilfillan's Literary Portraits—the very inappro- priate name which, for some mysterious reason, he gave to these lucubrations—were much talked about, and in certain quarters much esteemed ; indeed, the present writer remem- bers seeing among a list of questions proposed for discussion at a college debating society the remarkable inquiry : " Who is the greatest critic,—Jeffrey, Macaulay, or Gilfillan P"
Well, the oracle of Dundee had his day, and we are apt to suppose that the kind of thing which he supplied has ceased to be, or, at any rate, has ceased to be appreciated. But this is a great mistake. Gilfillan's success was largely due to the real cleverness with which he appealed to a taste—which does not go in and out like a fashion in dress, but which is always to be found among young and half-educated people—for the kind of rhetorical effect which is achieved by strong epithets and plenty of them, overcharged and undiscriminating statement of fact or opinion, oracular and enigmatic utter- ance of commonplace thought or trite sentiment, and a lavish display of those garish qualities of style which characterise the kind of writing praised by its admirers as eloquent and picturesque.
Here, for example, is Mr. W. j. Dawson, who, in the volume called Quest and Vision—another fantastic title— proves himself to be in a small way a new GilfilIan. Like his forerunner, Mr. Dawson is, we believe, a most popular preacher and lecturer; and it is, perhaps, the training of the pulpit and the platform which has got him into the way of writing something that is not exactly literature or journalism or -oratory, but is a compound of all three,—a something which is, perhaps, best described as criticism in perorations. It is a kind of writing which somewhere or other may have every known good quality but two. Brilliance, humour, vividness, and force,—we may possibly find all these things, or, at any rate, pretty fair imitations of them ; but restraint and repose never. To be constantly fizzing and crackling like a newly lighted fire which has been made up with rather damp fire- wood, seems to be the kind of thing that Mr. Dawson aims at ; and, to do him justice, he does not often miss the mark. We have called his kind of literary wares, criticism in perorations; and every one knows that in a peroration one looks for rhetorical effectiveness rather than for strict accu- racy. Still, Mr. Dawson's blunders in trivial things are so frequent that they rouse an uncomfortable suspicion of possible carelessness in matters of greater importance. We should have thought that the opening words of Jeffrey's famous criticism of The Excursion were familiar to every edu- cated person ; but though Mr. Dawson professes to quote them twice, and gives a different reading each time, neither ver- sion is correct. The most striking stanza ever written by Mr. Lewis Morris—that in which he speaks of Socrates as having "doubted men's doubts away "—also makes two appearances in Mr. Dawson's pages, and as in one of them the quotation is correct, the ridiculous blunder in the other must be the result of most reprehensible slovenliness. The Oxford move- ment of 1833 is antedated three years, and, worst of all, poor "Stella is robbed of almost her only remembered remark—the well-known saying about Dean Swift and the broomstick— that it may figure in Mr. Dawson's pages as a compliment paid by Dr. Johnson to Goldsmith.
The forebodings aroused by these lapses from accuracy in -passing references, are not dispelled by a study of Mr. Daw- son's more deliberate utterances. What truth is there, for example, in the ridiculous statement that "Lamb's humour [Mr. Dawson spells it "humor "] occasionally has a distinct alcoholic flavour," or what appropriateness in the not less ridiculous comparison made in the sentence which tells us
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that Dorothy Wordsworth's "greatness lay, like Mrs. Car lyle's, in her self-renunciation " P We do not hold a brief for Mr. Swinburne, and what Mr. Dawson probably means whet he writes about him has been said again and again in the Spectator ; but we should never think of saying that Mr. Swinburne "prostitutes his noble gifts to uphold the mon- strous thesis that the priceliest poetry is that which deals in the prominent details of fleshly fever' and 'amorous malady,'" for the simple reason that, so far as we know, the statement is mot true. Mr. Swinburne's early practice we admit and regret;
but can Mr. Dawson give any quotation in which the poet either formulates or upholds what he truly describes as a "monstrous thesis"? Of course not; but this is Mr. Dawson's perorating way of saying that Mr. Swinburne has written some very unwholesome and repulsive verse. He cannot be content with simple truth,—he must always force the note.
It would be useless, and worse than useless to deal with Mr. Dawson's work at any length were it wholly without value. No time seems to us more thoroughly wasted than the time of the critic who writes a " slogging " review of a trashy book merely to show his skill in the art of literary castiga- tion; for he simply gives pain to one person, a very contemp- tible kind of pleasure to others, and profit to nobody. But it is really worth while to expostulate with Mr. Dawson, because often, indeed frequently, he has something to say that is worth saying in a very much better manner than that which he has unfortunately chosen to adopt. There is much that is true without being commonplace in the essays on Shelley, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and George Eliot, and in the two thoughtful papers on the poetry of doubt and of despair. Even the article on George Meredith is in substance much more sane and sensible than• the utterances of the majority of the novelist's admirers, though it opens with a most ridiculous parallel between Mr. Meredith and the Matterhorn, and contains one passage which seems to us about the most wrong.headed passage in Mr. Dawson's book. He is speaking of the charge of cynicism which, he says, has been brought against Mr. Meredith, and he remarks that :—
" If we will take the trouble to analyse this so-called cynicism, we shall see at once that its component elements are really moral intensity and love of 'sacred reality.' To tell the plain truth is often to say a bitter thing, and for a good many people anything bitter is called cynical. And the supreme moral value of George Meredith's writing is its absolute witness to truth. He glosses over nothing. He sees clearly • the reddened sources' from which even the noblest passions spring. He is profoundly convinced that we can gain nothing in the long-run by ignoring any element of truth about ourselves. To leave the body out of consideration in our epitome of man, is as fatal a blunder as to ignore the soul. To collect only the finest qualities of a man or woman into a sort of odorous nosegay, and call that human nature, is to commit an outrage on justice."
We hope that Mr. Dawson will not think us unmannerly if we say, sans phrase, that all this talk about "sacred reality," and "witness to truth," and "reddened sources," is nonsense, and very objectionable nonsense to boot. Of course, the kind of writing referred to by Mr. Dawson may claim to be respect for reality, but it is obviously absurd to deny cynicism in work which claims " sacredness " on the ground that it omits no opportunity of turning up the seamy side for its own delight in dealing with the "reality" of seaminess. If this be not cynicism, let Mr. Dawson describe the sort of writing to which the term can be properly applied. But, as a matter of fact, this kind of reckless vagueness in language and thought is the inevitable defect of criticism in perorations. Mr. Dawson is evidently a man who reads and thinks, and we should be glad to see his genuine interest in good literature more widely diffused among preachers of his position ; but he may rest assured that he will not be what he might be as a guide and instructor of young and earnest students, until he substitutes for some of his more showy qualities the virtues of discrimination and restraint.
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