ENGLISH LITERATURE.*
WE cannot pretend to review the judgments which Messrs. Seccombe and Robertson Nicoll—the preface assigns the greater part of the work to Mr. Seccombe, and 'associates the name of Mr. J. H. Lobban—pass in these two volumes on some hundreds of British authors. It is never a very profit- able task to criticise criticism, and it becomes impossible when the range of subject is so large, when we have to begin pith Chaucer and are taken as far as Mr. Swinburne. One remark we may make without reserve ; the work shows a most praiseworthy completeness. Omissions there are, but we are not sure that they may not have been deliberately made. We do not see, for instance, the name of Mrs. Apbra Beim, though Henry Morley has something to say about her, and quite in his most broad-minded way,—Henry Morley himself, as a moat industrious worker in the literary field, might have been mentioned. Then there is Mrs. Tighe, whose poem, "Cupid and -Psyche," had, and deserved, a considerable popularity. We miss also Green, author of the " Spleen," a work which is included in Aiken's British Poets, and Hammond, "The English, Tibullue." But a full account of even the best of the poetae minores would manifestly be impossible. Charles Churchill, however, should have found a place, whether for his intrinsic merit, or for his relation to the literature of his time. Book IV. is devoted to "Satire and Essay," and it might be urged that Churchill deserves mention among English satirists as much as does Steele, not to say Addison, among English essayists. But on the whole we may say that very little is missing which we could expect to find. Every chapter gives proof of industry and careful research.
The book begins with a chapter on Caxton,—pronounced "Carston" or "Cawston," we are told, by his contemporaries. He is important enough to be put out of his chronological order. Few men have ever done so much work in so short a time. His life in England did not extend beyond fifteen years—he came over from Bruges in 1476 and died in 1491—and he was busily employed in the production and reproduction of books. Hia days were probably given to supervising the laboulii of the printing-house—he can hardly have left this, as our authors seem to think, to his apprentices —and he must have borrowed largely from the hours due to sleep to accomplish his vast work of translation. The matter of the books thus produced is chiefly valuable to writers who give a modern form to mediaeval romance; but the form is of much more importance. As our authors remark, Caxton "did much, as a voluminous translator, to fix the literary language of England." The first English printer thus disposed of, we begin in regular course with the first' English author, for so, to speak practically, Chaucer may be described. That there are earlier specimens of the language called English is of course true, but they are curiosities for the philologian, not literature for the reader. The fifteen pages given to the " morning star of English song" make an excellent piece of work. The poet is judiciously appreciated. So, in a comparison with the setting employed by Boccaccio and others, it is pointed out that the Canterbury Tales, instead of restricting the storytellers to a company of friends and equals, show us "a microcosm of English society in the latter part of the fourteenth century." Then there is a valuable account of Chaucerian criticism. In one respect, certainly, the poet's versification, it has been left for writers of our own time to do him justice. Dryden found nothing better here than a "rude sweetness," whereas there really was "an almost unrivalled music and mastery, of words." Out of the chapters that follow we would select for special praise the treatment of Spenser, the definition of The Faery. Queens personages as "not so much characters as richly coloured figures moving to the accompaniment of delicious music in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from' the earth," and the skilful analysis of the metrical form of the great poem.
In the Shakespeare chapter the necessarily limited space is employed to good purpose. Seventeen pages are a reasonable
• kb, Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature. By Thomas; Snecombened W. Robertson Nicoll. 2 vols. London Hodder and Stoughton. [15a. net.] proportion out of a total of little more than five hundred ; but what are they when the criticism of more than thirty dramas, the poet's biography, and the very difficult history of the text have to be compressed into them ? Messrs. Seccombe and Robertson Nicoll luive dealt with thoproblem as satisfactorily as could be expected. Their valuation of the plays is a well- considered piece of work. It is, they think, in 1594, with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, that Shake- speare " begins to distance all competitors," though the great tragedies of the first years of the seventeenth centary increase that distance immeasurably. Othello, they say, "is to our mind the greatest of all stage plays." " It requires," they add, ".Titans as actors," but would, if these could be found, be " too terrible to behold." Did either of our authors, we wonder, ever see Salvini in the title-role ? The postscript dealing with the text is a very valuable summary. " Shake- speare First and Next Milton" is part of the heading of chap. 8, and the juxtaposition is justified by a careful valuation of Milton's verse; for this special purpose the prose work may be left out of consideration. Here is an admirable expression of one aspect of the poet's greatness "Milton can get more vibration out of a word than any poet in our language. He worked upon the foundations of verbal utterance, and every word with him is charged not only with its plain meaning and its life-history as a word, but is fraught with a subtle music struck from seine secret chord, and freighted with a long chain of poetic reminiscence. In this manner is Milton's style nourished with the best thought and finest expression of time."
We must own that the History of English Literature pleases us less when we reach our own time. In the " Tennyson " chapter we cannot accept the judgment that the Ballads and Other Poems (published in 1880) "illustrates in a striking way the decay of his poetical faculty." A poet cannot always be equal to himself. Quandoque bonus dormitat Ramona, and a poetical faculty that had " decayed" could scarcely have pro- duced the "noble lines To Virgil," a composition which can stand comparison with the poet's very best achievements. Of minor notices, perhaps the least satisfactory is that of Walter Pater. All that the critics can find to say of that very fine work, Marius, is that the author "is seen struggling after an impossible perfection of style."
Something must be said of the illustrations. We cannot but think that portraits are the only legitimate adornment of this kind that a "History of Literature" should have. In these volumes the list is made up with reproductions of more or less meritorious genre pictures. In the first volume these are more numerous than the portraits, which, we presume, were harder to find. Whatever their intrinsic beauty, they seem to us not to be really pertinent.
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