BOOKS.
A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE.* Ma. Bucamtert is a poet, and as such is entitled to attention when he enters the field of poetical criticism. Not that the critic's art is necessarily allied to the creative energy demanded from the poet. Sometimes, as in the case of Coleridge, the gift of imagination and the power of estimating works of genius may be united in one person ; but generally the two faculties are distinct, and Scott, with the most widely imaginative intellect of his century, often blunders conspicuously when he attempts to criticise. He said, for example, as Collins, another good poet and bad critic had said before him, that Beaumont and Fletcher surpassed Shakespeare in drawing female characters, and be said that in his "tremendous drama of Cain," Byron had matched Milton on his own ground. What Byron was as a critic, the extravagance with which he exalted the genius of Pope, and how, in his estimate of contemporary poets, he placed Rogers above Wordsworth and Coleridge, ie known to all readers.
Mr. Buchanan, in his Look Round Literature, has the merit of exercising an independent judgment, and the fact that he has read much and thought much about things poetical, and that his life has been dedicated to literature, justify the respect with which a reviewer will read any volume to which he has subscribed his name. We confess that, while reading these essays with much interest, we have read them also with considerable irrita- tion, and yet it has not been always possible to ascertain the source of this feeling. It is not because we often disagree with the writer. Such disagreement is inevitable when a critic ranges from .sohylus to Walt Whitman. Mr. Buchanan, if he may be regarded as a literary combatant, is fairly equipped for the fight; but the annoyance of which we are continually conscious while reading his book is due, we think, in a measure, to a love of paradox, to a perverse exaggeration in his estimate of books and men, to an arrogant disregard of old landmarks, to the semi-prophetic utterance of a writer whom we stubbornly refuse to regard as a prophet. With the admission that we may be wrong and Mr. Buchanan wholly right, we will try and give a few illustrations of the way in which the author offends us, premising, however, that such indications must be necessarily slight, and that not one of them is perhaps of much account singly.
Not very long ago, as some of our readers will remember, Mr, Buchanan denounced an article in the Quarterly Review, which he was naive enough to confess he had not taken the trouble to read. The supposition that because the paper appeared in that journal it must needs deserve his reprobation, was a characteristic trait, and it is now followed up by what is termed a " Dedication" to the Quarterly reviewer, which is intended, we suppose, to be satirical, but is singularly feeble and pointless, while marked by a large assumption of superiority. We do not know whether the Quarterly has ever criticised Mr. Buchanan unfavourably ; bat the animus of the " Dedication " would seem to justify the belief. It is a relief to pass from this opening page to the essay, "From JEschylus to Victor Hugo," which, amidst much that is erratic, contains some fine criticism. Yet there is, we think, more of audacity than sobriety in bringing the majestic simplicity of the Greek poet into comparison with a genius so splendid even in its eccentricity, and at the same time so wanting in sanity, as that of Victor Hugo. Much, however, the writer has to say of Mr. Swinburne's idol that is full of suggestiveness, and for wealth of matter we are disposed to think this essay the ablest in the volume. He falls into a common mistake, but one against which every critic should protest, in calling a prose work a poem, the metrical form being as essential to the poet as colour to the painter. Let us admit, with Mr. Buchanan, that a prose story may be "as perfect in its way as a Greek tragedy, or at any rate, to reduce the question to a closer issue, infinitely more perfect than any novelist, with the exception, perhaps, of Hawthorne, chooses to make it." This is possible, but it does not remove the essential distinction between poetry and prose ; and we object to the looseness of the statement that Hugo has .0 d Look Round Literature. By Robert Buoluman. London: Ward and Downey.
attempted to use the novel " as a vehicle for the highest poetry of which the age is capable." The paper is by no means free from the startling assertions in which Mr. Buchanan delights. Coleridge mys, and we should have thought the criticism incon- testable, that Milton has thrown round the character of Satan " a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity ;" but in Mr. Buchanan's judgment, the malignity of Milton's Satan "is that of a petulant schoolboy, and his hatred of humanity is irrational and uninteresting." And he adds,—" This Devil is so morally foolish in his didactic wickedness, that we have little or no interest in him." And now the reader shall hear why Paradise Lost has become tedious, and its author fallen into the second or third rank of poets :— " The poetry of the world constitutes one great and as yet uncom- pleted Poem, the last utterance of which shall not be heard until Humanity has reached the final point of divine knowledge and con- summate literary expression ; and the rank and worth of every poet is to be determined earlier or later, by his relation to the cosmic music of which his song is to form a part."
These are "facts," we are told, that every student of literature must admit. We shall be glad to do so when we understand them ; at present, we are more impressed by the rhetoric of the passage, than enlightened by its meaning. But the dark sayings of prophets are proverbial, and this is one of the prophetic utterances of which, as we have intimated, there are several in the volume. The critic remarks on the "unutterable despair" that forms a characteristic of Hugo's novels ; and referring else- where to his gloom, he says that he fails to image the hopes and aspirations of his age, and is in this respect inferior to Shelley, who is the most religions of all modern poets, with the exception of Wordsworth. If the reader is slightly startled by this asser- tion, possibly he will be still more surprised to find on the next page that Mr. Swinburne is one of the army of God whose out- rageousness must be forgiven " when he speaks, as he so often can and will, the lovely language of Sion ;" or to learn from a paper on Rossetti, that he is "in many respects the least carnal and most religions of modern poets ;" and to read in a note on Zola, that "no living writer has a stronger and parer sense of the beauty of moral goodness ;" and in " A Souvenir " of Charles Reads, that Trollope'a art "was the art of Count Smorltork plus the bathos of vestrydom." And we do not think the better of Mr. Buchanan's critical judgment when we light upon the statement that Mr. Matthew Arnold, who "has written charming verses," is not, " in the strict sense of the word, a poet at all."
The most pleasant chapters in the book are those in which the author records his reminiscences of Thomas Love Peacock and of Sydney Dobell. From the former we quote a short passage which will interest every one who has read—and who has not ?—Professor Dowdcn's interesting biography of Shelley :— " Nothing can be more gentle, more guarded, than Peacock's printed account of Shelley. His private conversation on the subject was, of course, very different. Two subjects he did not refer to in his articles may safely be mentioned now,—Shelley's violent fits of passion, and the difficulty Peacock found in keeping on friendly terms with Mary Godwin As for Mary Godwin, I fancy Peacock never really liked her, and this fact, of course, meet be weighed in estimating his opinions relative to her nod her predecessors [sic]. On one occasion at least, he refused to enter Shelley's house while `she was in it,' and was only constrained to do so by an entreaty from Mary herself. On the whole, he is just, even generous, to her memory ; but he certainly preferred Harriett, if only on the ground of her surpassing beauty."
Mr. Buchanan's talk about George Eliot, at whose house he was a frequent guest, leaves a most uncomfortable impression. No woman could have been more thoroughly gentle and feminine; but the way she is made to express the belief she held, is repel- lent in its brusqueness, and the praise awarded to her is half- veiled with contempt. " What I saw of George Eliot personally," he writes, "confirmed me in my impression that the Sibylline business, both publicly and privately, had been overdone." And upon reading her life, the writer says that the Sibyl is still peeing, and will not let us catch one glimpse of her real face. How- ever, " posterity is not likely to trouble itself about her ;" "and for my own part," exclaims Mr. Buchanan, "I would rather have written The Cloister and the Hearth than half-a-dozen Romolae ; and I would rather have been Charles Reade, great, neglected, and misunderstood in his generation, than the pretentious and pedagogic Talent which earned the tinsel crown of contempo- rary homage to be speedily dethroned, and, in the good time that is coming for Genius, justly forgotten." What reason he has
to anticipate this good time, the author does not say. Is it when the world comes to"see in Walt Whitman " a personality worthy to rank even above that of Socrates P" " and akin," as Mr. Buchanan adds, with an exaggeration which to most readers will sound like blasphemy, "to One infinitely greater than Socrates." " We have other poets," he observes, " but we have no other divine poet. We have a beautiful singer in Tennyson, and some day it will be among Tennyson's highest honours that he was once named kindly and appreciatively by Whitman."
Mr. Buchanan's reiterated prophecy of a good time coming, when literature, which is now suffering under the pains and penalties of an " Inquisition," shall rise to a new life, is clearly not based upon any progressive movement in society as it exists at present. On the contrary, religion, we are told, is waning, and literature failing ; there can be no doubt that the progress for the last decade has been a progress downward, and "all standards have been lowered in answer to the popular demand for wild mental or moral stimulants." But there are men destined to reform the world, and this is what we read about them :—" As poets, they believe in all the gods, from Jesus to Josh. They believe in Professor Haeckel, and they believe in the Cardinal. As men of the world, they turn their ears of sympathy to everything human. As students of literature, they decline to accept any work as supremely creative or authoritative which does not take count of all the forces which condition the moral immortality of the human race."
As on so many points we feel ourselves out of accord with Mr. Buchanan, it is a pleasure to agree with his judgment that a book is great not on account of its cleverness, its brilliance, its literary pretences, bat on account of its wisdom, and that the style in which that wisdom should be expressed is one neither superficially effective nor openly meretricious, but one which " unites perfect harmony of meaning with sanity of expression." Most true ! Strange to say, however, the want of this sanity is perhaps the most prominent feature of A Look Round Literature.
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