FORSYTH'S ESSAYS.*
'THESE essays are written in plain, vigorous, correct language, and if never brilliant, are always clear. Mr. Forsyth, the reader feels, is an accomplished, sensible man, who has made himself master of a sound work-day style, and can discourse fluently on any subject on which an article is likely to be wanted by the • editorial powers. His observations are almost always judicious, -almost never original or striking. A great deal of information -of a useful, though not of a recondite kind, is made conveniently accessible in his essays. Those whose time is so much taken up in unintellectual pursuits that they can read little, and are in -quest of literary ware more profitable than novels and less difficult than philosophy, will find them pretty much what they want. We should be misunderstood if we were supposed-to say that Mr. Forsyth's book is of no value. It is not the work of a man of genius, but it is the work of a man of ability, of information, of literary accomplishment ; so highly esteemed by the editorial mind, that the Tory Quarterly, the Whig Edinburgh, the Radical Fraser, and the neutral Good Words are glad to bask in the light of his -countenance.
The common-place nature of a large proportion of Mr. Forsyth's observations on literary style seems to depend, more or less, on defec - tive acquaintance with the writings of the authors of whom he speaks. What he says of De Quincey is so good, that we can account only in this way for the fact that his remarks on Carlyle are poor. The few quotations he gives from De Quincey appear to demonstrate that he has some sense of humour, and can appreciate the subtle -charm which a stroke or two of humorous extravagance may lend to original thought and metaphoric language. But he can see nothing better than affectation or distortion in the humorous writing of Carlyle. Of course it is possible that he may understand De Quincey, and yet fail to do justice to a genius so different as that of Carlyle ; but as he names only two of Carlyle's books, the Life of Schiller and the Latter-Day Pamphlets, we think it more probable that, when he wrote this essay, he was unacquainted with Sartor Resartus, the French Revolution, and Oliver Cromwell. It is exceedingly feeble to say that Carlyle wrote the Life of Schiller in "his natural manner," and that, compared with his later books, it is "a well-written biography." The distinctive powers of Carlyle reveal themselves in the Life of Schiller, but it is only as the powers of Michael Angelo might have revealed themselves in a careful and subdued drawing executed in his Touth. Even the Latter-Day Pamphlets, though harsh, exaggera- ted, and dissonant beyond anything else in the works of their author, afford tenfold better evidence of inventive and gigantic capacity as a literary artist than the academic Life of Schiller.
* Essays, Critical and Narrative. By W. Forsyth, Q.C., LL.D., Author of "Lite of Cicero," &e. London: Longmans and Co.
Either Mr. Forsyth is unacquainted with all the greatest works of Carlyle, or he has not the organ to appreciate them. His
general remarks on style, are for the most part, shallow. He admits that, "in point of calibre," the prose literature of Germany is superior to that of France ; but he adds that "its momentum is impeded, and the number of its readers sensibly narrowed, by
the astounding heaviness and desperate clumsiness of its style." The sentence which succeeds this is so naively characteristic of the safe-and-sound man who writes for both the old Quarter- lies, that we cannot pass it by. "There seems in this [the obscurity and clumsiness of German prose] to be almost a Providential safeguard, if we consider the nature and tendency of much that is published, in that vast hive of busy thinkers and laborious writers." Is it not a sweet idea of the method of the divine government,' that Providence obscures the genius of Ger- many, in order to protect the stolidity of England ? But we re- fuse to admit that German prose can be justly characterised as astoundingly heavy and desperately clumsy. The style of France is, perhaps, for newspaper purposes, the best in the world ; and beyond question, there are many heavy and obscure writers of German prose. But Fichte's style is magnificently clear, strong, and nervous ; Lessing's is as terse and compact, as rapid, biief, and trenchant as that of any English writer ; Schiller's prose, though stately almost to pompousness, is perfectly perspicuous and nobly melodious ; and the best prose of Goethe is about as good as prose can conceivably be. The style of George Eliot is modelled upon the best German style, rather than upon the French. Our admiration for good French prose is great, and we do not hesi- tate to admit that, as a general rule, it is superior to that of Germany ; but Mr. Forsyth falls into a grave mistake in repeating the hackneyed abuse of German style, without mentioning that Germany has produced a few of the greatest masters of prose that have appeared in any literature. Some of Mr. Forsyth's counsels are worthy only of a priggish pedagogue. He persist- ently urges that young men should guard against a florid and ornate style, should tone down their ardour and severely prune their metaphors. This advice is superficial and misleading. A florid style is as natural to a young man of imaginative brain and literary capabilities as blossom is natural to a cherry-tree in March or an apple-tree in April. A plenteous blossoming by no means ensures a rich crop, but there never was a good crop without a fair show of blossom. There are east winds, frosty nights, hail-showers, and other means pro- vided by nature for thinning-out her bunches of blossom, and - securing that only a small part of the young fruit shall " set ; " and there are corresponding influences which, as the young man proceeds to cultivate literature, will curtail the exuberance of his feelings and of his fancies, without any artificial repression. Almost the only serviceable advice which critics of style can give to young men is to be true to themselves, to write natur- ally, unaffectedly, from the heart, and to read good writers.
The word " good " here cannot be defined in any formula, but the young man will do well to give a trial to as many as he can of those who, in the judgment of several generations, have made a deep mark in the literature of their country. Honest sympathy and careful consideration will do more for him in his reading than the advice of critics. The larger number of these will always inculcate admiration for accepted common-place, and it is an easy thing for excessive admiration of common-place to extinguish individuality. We are always thrown back upon the great _ Shakespearean maxim,—" This, above all, to thine own self be true ;" nurse, with as little of affectation or perversity, of mere mannerism or the trick of singularity, as you can, the particular gift or grace that belongs to you. If you have none such, do not try to seem to have one by dint of straining or imitation ; learn to write grammatically, and be content.
Mr. Forsyth seldom says strong things, and we were there- fore the more surprised when we came upon the following refer- ence to Sir Archibald Alison :—" It is our deliberate opinion that he furnishes the most signal example of what we may characterise as imposture of style." The italics are Mr. Forsyth's. He does not vouchsafe the smallest explanation of what he means by imposture of style, and the entire evidence by which he sup- ports so startling an assertion consists in a quotation, in the text, of Mr. Disraeli's stale saying about Mr. Wordy, and a speci- fication, in a note, of a couple of slips in Latin quotation, one of which may very likely have been a printer's error. Sir Archibald Alison's defects have been often pointed out, but his style is no more an imposture than Mr. Forsyth's ; and it would have been a far more creditable feat on Mr. Forsyth's part to detect, by critical insight, the element in Sir Archibald's twenty-volume
history Which has rendered it one of the most popular works of the century, than it is to apply, without shadow of proof, to an author of repute, a term which seems to imply positive criminality.
We turned with some eagerness to Mr. Forsyth's essay on the rules of evidence as applicable to the credibility of history. It was delivered in the form of a lecture to the Victoria Institute, a society whose chief end it is to prosecute controversial campaigns in defence of the truth of Christianity ; and it was reasonable to expect that Mr. Forsyth, a man of education and a Queen's Counsel, would have endeavoured to test with critical exactness the historical truth of the documents which contain the record of the origin of our religion. Mr. Forsyth makes the mistake of diffusing his energies over an immense field, instead of concentrating them on the particular problem with which, we should think, the Victoria Institute must have intended him to deaL In the course of twenty-five pages, he might have placed before us a sufficing abstract of the grounds on which the ablest orthodox critics now base the argument in defence of the historic truth of the New Testa- ment. Instead of confining himself to this piece of solid hard work, he ranges far and wide, making, as his manner is, a number of judi- cious observations, telling us what John Stuart Mill and Sir G. Cornewall Lewis said on particular questions of evidence, throw- ing in a lucid summary of Bentley's arguments in his famous dissertation on the letters of Phalaris, and dealing blows right and left at Dr. Newman and Strauss, but leaving us at the end with our ideas on the subject of historical evidence more confused than when we began. About a page and a quarter are devoted to the "special objects" of the Victoria Institute. This amount of space is made up of two separate portions, occurring in different parts of the lecture. In the first, Mr. Forsyth professes to summarise "the proofs of the miracles related in the Gospels and the Acts." The summary is as follows :—(1.) "They are recorded by eye-witnesses, who must either have been the dupes of an imposture or the fabricators of a falsehood. (2.) They were done openly, in the face of enemies, who, so far as we know, never denied them. (3.) They were done with an adequate motive and cause. (4.) They serve to explain the -origin of a religion which has lasted for eighteen centuries, and won its way in spite of the fiercest opposition." In the other place where the question of the historic evidence of Christianity is ex- pressly treated, Mr. Forsyth speaks of "the substantial agreement, together with the circumstantial variety, of statements of four different contemporary eye-witnesses." Surely the least that can be said of these sweeping and random assertions is that they furnish an apt example of the confusion which prevails as to the nature of historical proof. The ignorance betrayed by Mr. Forsyth, and by the Victoria Institute, which let his statements pass, is almost in- credible. Every tolerably well-informed Sunday-school teacher knows that two of the Gospels —those of St. Mark and St. Luke—were not written by Apostles. St. Luke is supposed to have been the companion of St. Paul, St. Mark of St Peter, but there is no evidence that either of them saw Christ in the flesh. St. Matthew and St. John were Apostles, but many able critics—in fact, the great majority of critics—believe that we have but a translation of St. "Matthew's Gospel, the original being hopelessly lost; and all intelligent and candid judges, even if they admit that St John wrote the Gospel with which his Uitine is associated, admit also that it was written many years after the occurrence of the transactions it describes, and that the author set before us the image of Christ reflected in the mirror of his own mind rather than a literal transcript of facts. We believe that when the Gospel records have been subjected to the most searching investigation, an imperishable kernel of historic verity remains, adequate to place the assertion that Jesus Christ raised the dead on a level with the best authenticated historical facts. But it is preposterous in Mr. Forsyth and the Victoria Institute to give out that we have four independent eye-witnesses of the gospel miracles. We expected to find theessay on historical evidence the most valuable in the volume, but we found it the weakest of all. It affords a striking illustration of the placid ignorance as to the state of opinion among the foremost representatives of European culture which may be displayed by Quarterly Reviewers and Queen's Counsel in this favoured land.
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