MR. GEORGE WYNDHAM'S LITERARY ESSAYS.' IT was the intention of
Mr. George Wyndham to write " a big book about romantic literature." He sketched the design in a letter to his mother ; there were to be twelve chapters, of which rather more than half were written. The gaps— the Chroniclers and the Crusades, Dante and he Spaniards, Chaucer and the New French Romantics—wale never filled, but for the rest Mr. Whibley has faithfully put thalbook together according to the plan, save that he has refrained from cutting down the essays on Plutarch and Shakespeare, as Mr. Wyndham intended to do, on the ground that " this is a task too delicate for friendship." But no one will cavil at his decision. In the interests of balance the reduction might be justified ; but ,with all its redundancies the essay on North's Plutarch is one of the finest mixed studies of politics and literature written in this or any time. The task was given him by W. E. Henley, and the choice showed a flair of the highest order. For George Wyndham had in him a combination of qualities truly Elizabethan. He was a great lover of books, an enthusiast for letters, a sportsman, a soldier who had served with distinction, a man of the world, and a politician. He spared no pains in the collection of facts, but his industry left no traces on his style, in which the charm of his personality, his enthusiasm and love of beauty appear on every page. He was not a profound classical scholar, or he would not have subscribed to the view, rightly traversed by Mr. Whibley, that the classics are not romantic. There are moments, too, in which his passion for vivid utterance led him into the use of hectic epithets. But • Essays in Romantle Llemaarc. ay George Wyndham. Edited, with an
Introductlea, by Charles Whitley. London( Ifsmaillan. sett
it would be hard to better the style of the essay on Plutarch. Here he had a subject exactly fitted to his temperament. It was not only the theme that appealed to him, but the methods of the writer. " For Plutarch's methods, at least• in respect of politics and war, are not those of analysis or of argument, but of pageant and drama., with actors living and moving against processions that more and live." Though Plutarch's political pronouncements were few, the theory at the root of them was in substantial accordance with IVyntlhanas convictions. So he quotes with approval Plutarch's support of republics against monarchies, but only that the man ' brass to rule' may have authority, such a man, for instance, as Lycurgus, ' born to rule, to command, and to give orders, flg having in him a certain natural grace and power to draw
men willingly to obey him.' " The italics are George Wyndham's, and they throw light on his saying in 1907, apropos of a political campaign, " the gentry of England Inset not. abdicate" So, again, he defends Plutarch's exclusion from his portrait gallery of private persons, comedians, poets, or artists
"Ho cannot conceive that any young 'gentleman nobly born' should so much as wish to be Phidias or Polycletert or Anacreon; and this from no vulgar contempt for the making of beautiful things, nor any mean reverence for noble birth, but because, over and above the making of beautiful things, .there are deeds that are better worth the doing, and berms.. men of noble birth are freer than others to choose what deeds they will set themselves to do."
The peculiar merits of Plutarch as a biographer aro illustrated with great felicity of illustration and comment. " Doubtless his aim was moral, yet assuredly he never pursued it by denoting none save the virtuous acts" of his heroes. On the contrary, his practice is "to record their every act of significance, whether good or bad," a method recently approved by Sir E. T. Cook in his admirable essay on biography. And from an examination of Plutarch's picturesque and human touches, the sorcery of his art, his use of incident, his creation of the atmosphere of suspense, we pass to a fine vindication of his gentleness and courtesy. From Juvenal and Petronius "men have constructed a fanciful world of unbounded cruelty and immitigable lust . yet if Plutarch be not the most colossal, taking and ingenious among the world's liars, we cannot choose but hold that it never existed." Shakespeare took from Plutarch the love of Coriolanus for his mother, and with a multiplicity of happy citations Wyndham illustrates the love of parents for their children and Plutarch's own high standard of humanity in the treatment of animals. The modernity of the Lines lends them perennial freshness. Only in man's attitude towards Om supernatural is there a signal change.
If Plutarch was happy in his theme and inspired in its treat- ment, he enjoyed unexampled fortune in his great translators. They not only transmitted but transfigured his masterpiece. Amyot and North were men after his own heart, courteous, gallant, and kindly gentlemen, endowed with literary gifts which their original did not possess. North reproduced the splendid rhythm and eloquence of Amyot while remaining essentially faithful to Plutarch. Where his interpolations add a new thought, it is either in keeping with the original, or adds a new grace. North, in fine, was one of the glories of his age a great prose writer who could carve jewelled please. or say a plain thing in a plain way ; equally at home in purple or in homespun. Mr. Wyndham does not over-labour Shakespeare's debt, for it is incalculabfe ; and in a leaser writer would have been denounced as mere plunder. A good point is made, however, in insisting on the indebtedness of the writer., of the Authorized Version to the rhythm and diction of North. Plutarch was not strictly a classical writer. He wrote rather cumbrous Greek at the end of the first century A.D. But he was a great interpreter of tho romantic spirit in Greece and Rotor, ad lent wings to the romantic movement in France and England. If Plutarch and Lucian are not classics, it is the fault of a pedantic classification which has ruled them out of the cation. But they have in them the right stuff of rontanrn. The long study of Shakespeare's Poems is a fine example of that imaginative appreciation which Mr. Wyndham chair:al as his special endowment. And it is marked by norm wally original and suggestive criticisni as well as by subtle analysis of Shakespeare's prosody. Best of all we like his resolute refusal to regard Shakespeare as a trafficker in problems or riddles or as a writer of disguised autobiography. Ronson' seas another kindred spirit, a gentleman-at•arms ready alike to
lead a revel or a forlorn hope. The Phi iade proved an exemplar ililla imilabile it suffered from its fecundity and floridity, and was " snowed under " by the academic reaction. But Ronsard and his group had the root of the matter in them in cherishing the vernacular, enriching it by traffic with the living as well as the dead, and emancipating metre from the dead hand of the past ; and they have came gloriously into their own again. The study of The Poetry of the Prison with Charles d'Orlians and Villon as chief figures is more mannered than the other chapters, and has furnished Mr. Whibley with the occasion for an acrimonious reference to " R. L. 5.'s " essay on Villon. A paper on Elizabethan Adventure in Elizabethan Literature, and a generous act of homage to Scott as a man and art artist, and above all as the creator of romantic-realism, conclude a volume which inspires admiration for the writer mingled with deep regret that he was not spared to complete his design.
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