BOOKS.

MR. SAINTSBURY'S ESSAYS:* To the reader who is a lover of literature, good criticism is always welcome, and Mr. Saintsbury's claim to be a good critic.: is attested by the variety of his knowledge, by the sanity of his judgment, and by his comprehensive appreciation of literary excellence. Thirteen authors are called up in these pages, the first on the HA being the poet Crabbe, and the last George Borrow. There is also an introductory essay on "The Kinds of Criticism." Of this a word or two may be said before we pass on to the half-critical, half-biographical papers that form the bulk of the volume.

One of Mr. Saintsbury's characteristics is sound sense, and he has therefore no sympathy with the affectations and eccen- tricities that deform nowadays much of our criticism. He confesses himself entirely unable to understand what scien- tific criticism of literature means, and asserts that it must always be a contradiction in term a :—

"For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are com- municated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy : and this makes science, in any proper sense powerless. She can deal only with classes, only with general laws ; and so long as those classes are constantly reduced to species of one,' and these laws are set at nought by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled, and find all her elaborate plant of

formulas and generalisations useless You will find that on the showing of this science falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour arranged by another man or in another fashion, Make a permanent addition to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise, the whole end, aim, and object of literature, and the criticism of literature, as of all art, and tho criticism of all art, is beauty and the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to do."

With the main argument of this passage we entirely agree; but instead of saying that the whole end and object of litera- ture is beauty, it would, we thi4k, be more correct to say that through beauty literature attains its end, and that without it there can be no literature, just as without breath there can be

no life, and yet breathing is not the end and object of life.

Mr. Saintsbury insists upon the necessity of the compara- tive method in criticism, and therefore of wide and careful reading; and after citing Mr. Howells as an "awful example" of a very clever writer " wl5o has commenced critic disdaining this preparation," the writer adds : "I hope that we shall one day have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical dicta on novels and other things ; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible of books, as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge." But knowledge will not always save a man from the most astounding of literary judgments. Of all modern critics, Mr. Matthew Arnold was perhaps the most thoroughly equipped for his vocation. He was armed at all points, and enthusiasm never led him astray as in a few cases it led Charles Lamb, and as, we venture to think, it often leads Mr. Swinburne. Yet Arnold, though a true poet himself, calmly expressed his conviction that Shelley's Essays and Letters would "resist the wear-and-tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his poetry." Sir Henry Taylor, again, though, like Matthew Arnold, a poet and a man of wide culture, a critic, moreover, who was certainly well qualified to use the comparative method that should have saved him from going astray, declared that 99 per cent. of what Burns had written was worthless, and that he had not read a poem of his that was worthy to live for twenty years. And once more, to take an illustration from a living critic, Professor Veitch, whom Mr. Saintsbury calls "a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of genius," states that Hogg was in the main true when, "with

an almost sublime egotism," he told Scott that he was king of a school of poetry far higher than his. Now, these amazing criticisms, which the most incompetent of literary judges could „* -888a118 Eitgtia, Litontorc, /780-1850, By George Saintsbury. London: recoival and Co.

with difficulty surpass, may suffice to show that no amount of preparation will keep a critic from falling. Personal liking interferes with judgment constantly in sonic instances, far less frequently in others ; but few ardent lovers of literature are so passionless as to be able to use the comparative method, or any critical method, impartially, and there is, therefore, always room for criticising the best critics.

To Hazlitt, one of the finest critics of our century, Mr. Saintsbury devotes a suggestive essay. He was a remarkable instance of a born critic, who, when prejudice interfered with judgment, displayed the most fatuous incapacity. No one perhaps has said finer things about books and men, and no writer of high mark has ever said more foolish things. He charms us infinitely in one page, he disgusts or irritates us in the next; but in his best mood he rarely fails to carry the reader with him. His hatred of Sir Walter Scott,

which he shared with Peacock, does no harm to that best- beloved of writers ; but it proves, as his Life of Napoleon and his judgment of the Duke of Wellington prove, that if Frazlitt, as Thackeray said, is "one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived," he is also, when hi his mad moods, one of the most perverse. Yet how true and bow admirably expressed is the following estimate of his genius !—

"In most writers, in all save tho very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly wall that other (generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in Browne. But in liazlitt you may find something of almost everything, except the finer kinds of wit and humour ; to which last, however, he makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can be found in prose, may be found at times in his. He is generally thought of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straight- forward writer with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most of the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled :tarlatan to brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the English Poets, or the description of Winterslow and its neigh- bourhood in the Farewell to Essay-Writing,' or On a Land- scape of Nicholas Poussin' in the Table-Talk. Head these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave and simple manner occur."

Mr. Saintsbury admits that Hazlitt is an inveterate quoter, but adds.that the error lies rather in the constant repetition Of the same, than "in a too great multitude of different bor- rowings." Repetition there often is, no doubt, but there are the" different borrowings "also, and his pages are deformed by the number of inverted commas. On the whole, Mr. Saints- bury's estimate of Hazlitt is the ablest we have seen, and it is also the most just.

Another striking essay is on Lockhart, about whom most readers know very little. Yet to him we are not only indebted for the best Life of Burns, but, if we except Boswell's Johnson, for the finest literary biography in the language. His Spanish Ballads, too, is a delightful book, and his novels are, we believe, still alive, and deserve to be Nevertheless, as Mr. Saintsbury points out, Lockhart seems to have missed his due meed of praise, and there is no collected edition of his works. A selection from the hundred articles he is said to have con-

tributed to the Quarterly might not have an extensive sale, but it could scarcely fail to attract readers who love fine

literature. Lockhart made plenty of enemies by his sarcasms, and the literary sins of his youth were remembered against him. "Those were days," says Mr. Saintsbury, alluding to Lockhart's editorship of the Quarterly Review, "when the famous 'Scum condensed of Irish bog' lines appeared in a great daily newspaper about O'Connell. Imagine the Times addressing Mr. Parnell as 'Scum condensed of Irish bog,' with the other amenities that follow, in this year of grace !" If, however, the Times could not use such language in our day, Mr. Parnell can, and in calling his once devoted followers "miserable scum" and "gutter-sparrows" imitates to per- fection the Billingsgate of sixty or seventy years since.

Mr. Saintsbury appears to have selected for these Essays authors who are just now out of favour or out of mind. Crabbe, with whom his volume opens, although one of the most original of poets, is almost wholly neglected ; and so, strange to say, is Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies and Lalla Boolch were it one time on every drawing-room table. Between these two poets there is no affinity. Crabbe's verse is marked throughout by sincerity and freedom from artifice. He never tries to be poetical, and when his homely but inimitable verse rises into poetry, it may be almost said to be accidental. "The English Muse," writes Emerson, "says with Be Staa I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force me into the clouds.'" A falser illustration than this of the English Muse it would be difficult to imagine ; but it is an eminently true illustration when applied to Crabbe. He delights in using the baldest language, in walking in paths wholly devoid of beauty, in describing men and women of the least elevated type ; but as a story-teller in verse he is un- equalled in his own line, and yet the delight be affords is duo far less to the humour, the pathos, and the vividness of his narrative than to the poetical emotion that pervades it. The world of poetry is wide, and if Crabbe's little kingdom bears no resemblance to that of Coleridge or of Keats, there is no disputing his lordship over it. In a measure we agree with Mr. Saintsbury's estimate of this remarkable poet. It may be sometimes true of Crabbe that "he is pictorial rather than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial;" his taste is sometimes execrable, and it may be admitted that his verse is lacking in the enchanting music with which the greatest masters of the art hold us captive ; but faults such as these, although conspicuous, are not persistent in his tales, and the critic's conclusion that save at the rarest moments Crabbe was not a poet, is one which his admirers—and among students of poetry be has many—will not readily accept.

Whatever reputation Thomas Moore merits is due to the poetical quality in which Crabbe is chiefly deficient. He knows how to sing, and his voice, though never powerful, is sweet. His taste, like Crabbe's, is not good, for it is often tawdry, and he mistakes tinsel for gold ; but in his best mood Moore shows true poetic feeling, and an ear for melody. He has humour, too, of a genuine kind ; and if he wrote much verse fitted only for the hour, his Irish Melodies, linked as they are to lovely music, ought to preserve his fame. Mr. Saintsbury, however, is not content with praising some of Moore's lyrics warmly—and this praise they surely deserve—but he mentions as three of the finest songs in any language, "Oft in the stilly night," "When in death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the beach." This is a matter of taste which is not to be disputed, but we wish that the writer had selected as a specimen of Moore's lyrical genius the ten lines beginning, "At the mid-hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly," a straiu which appears to us even more beautiful than any of the songs selected for this high eulogium. Thomas Moore, in spite of much that is artificial, has a -genuine' gift of poetry, —not to mention his much higher gift for satire,—and does • not deserve the neglect that has lately been his portion. It • would be difficult to hint an objection to the following estimate of his claims :— "Be has at least something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a poet and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only considerable, but it is also distinguished ; it is a faculty which in the same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had the gift of singing these admirable songs of which we have been balking. On the other he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which only three others of the great dead men of this century in England— Canning, PITA, and Thackeray—have reached."

, To our mind Moore's gift for satiric verse surpasses greatly both Praed's and Thaekeray's. The criticism of Pra,ed, by- the-way, forms what to some readers may prove the liveliest essay in this volume. To them we will leave it, with the remark that Mr. Saintsbury appears to estimate exactly the position held by Praed when he writes of him as "playing with litera- ture and with life not frivolously or without heart, but with no very deep cares and with no very passionate feeling."

The article on De Quincey, printed as recently as last June in Macmillan's Magazine, may be familiar to our readers, and Professor Masson's edition of the" Opium-Eater's" works has perhaps been sufficiently noticed of late in the Spectator to make recurrence to the subject unnecessary. But there is one passage referring to Coleridge in the Be Quincey essay which we are tempted to quote, for it shows the robust good sense of the writer,—an especially welcome quality in these days :— I sort of foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us th t because Coleridge wrote The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, he was quite entitled to leave his wife and children to be looked a ter by anybody who chose, to take stipends from casual bana- l' etors, and to scold by himself or by his next friend, Mr. Words-

worth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole, who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds for a trip to the Azores."

Mr. Saintsbury, as we have observed, has selected for his criticism the works of writers whose popularity, for a time at least, has passed away. We have already mentioned Lock- hart, Hogg, and Moore as authors who, in the judgment of the essayist, merit more than they receive, and he holds a similar opinion with regard to Wilson and Leigh Hunt. Wilson's striking powers of body and mind made him at one time the principal figure in Edinburgh. Few men have ever lived a fuller life, and while he was alive, his virtues and his faults alike, which displayed themselves in exhaustless energy and genial recklessness, prevented a proper estimate of his literary position. He seemed like Saul, higher than any of his associates, and it was difficult to measure his height impartially. "Christopher North "was the life and soul of Blackwood, and Blackwood's Magazine had no competitor in Scotland. It was delightful to have a writer so daring, so outspoken, so full of enthusiasm, so rich in poetic fancies, and his admirers did not care, by the help of the comparative method, to estimate his place in literature. It is strange that a man so virile should have sometimes written in the sickly, effeminate style that marks his Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life ; but in criti- cising great authors, and especially great poets, his enthusiasm is contagious. The most unequal of writers, and often the unsoundest of critics, he writes with the healthy energy of a man who loves Nature as much as books, and the out-of-door freshness of his discursive essays inclines one to forget their shortcomings. "An intelligent man," says Mr. Saintsbury, "may be angry with Christopher. I should doubt if any one who is not occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a whole." And writing of the suitableness of Wilson's miscellaneous work for purposes of recreation, he says with some truth, but a slight touch of exaggeration :—" For that purpose I think it to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order."

Here, not for lack of matter, but of space, we must close this instructive and highly entertaining volume. Several of the Essays, and notably those on Leigh Hunt, Sydney Smith, and Jeffrey, might well have detained us longer; but readers who love good literature and good criticism may be trusted to peruse the volume without further aid from us.