SIR ARI.B.U.R QUILLER-COUCH'S STUDIES IN LITERATURE.* OF these fifteen "
Studies," ten were delivered at Cambridge, two have appeared as Introductions in the " World's Classics " series, and two are reprinted from the Edinburgh and the Times Literary Supplement. They are, as the author describes them, in the main " familiar discourses," though they treat incidentally of such high matters as Mysticism and Metaphysics, and exhibit an engaging union of vivacity and good sense, fantasy and sanity. Promotion to professorial rank has not killed the old, or perhaps we should say the young, " Q." True, he does speak of " innomi- nate " lays and uses such words as " autoschediastic," but for the greater part his style is refreshingly alert and unacademic. Indeed, he is almost too anxious to avoid incurring the charge of dryness, too prone to leaven seriousness with some jocular modern illus- tration. He excels in the " skirmishing line "—to borrow a phrase which he applies to Donne—and is never happier than when he is tilting at abstractions, ponderous, patronizing, philosophizing German liter- ary critics, " isms," and tendency-mongers, prosaic commentators, un- imaginative men of science. He is never afraid to quote, and a delightful anthology could be compiled from these pages. His taste is singu- larly catholic, and he writes with respect, and even with sympathy, of all innovators and smashers of effete traditions. Yet he is substantially a child of his generation, and abstains from passing judgment on contemporary writers, on the ground that " a man even of my years has no right to speak, or very little power to speak usefully," of the young poets. This is carrying the doctrine of maxima debetur pueris reverentia rather far. Anyhow, " Q " manages to keep his mind wonderfully fresh, and we are not inclined to cavil at his use of italics in prose, though he pronounces it " a deVice almost unpardonable in poetry."
His first study—that on the Commerce of Thought—is a good specimen of " Q's " imaginative and discursive treatment of history. He starts with the old trade routes and their fascination, discusses the origin of wars, notes that man fights and migrates for love or hunger, commerce or women, sometimes for religion, but never for learning. A picturesque digression deals with evanescent trade routes, killed by steam, revived by petrol. Then from the dis- semination of plants, deliberate or casual, and the introduction of strange breeds of animals, we pass to the romantic fertilization and spread of thought by recoveries from old dustheaps or mummy- wrappings ; the mystery of Sahara gossip and the world-wide community of folk-stories ; libraries and their fates, from York to Louvain ; roads and poor wandering scholars lured overseas by the fame of Universities, but above all by the passion for search— the secret and reward of all learning. In his study of Ballads " Q " makes excellent hay of the extravagances of the school of Grimm, and the supporters of collective authorship. Taking a number of first-rate examples, he finds in all the unmistakable common notes of impersonality and rapidity of movement. They were written for the people, orally transmitted, and often recast to suit a fresh set of events. The best of them come from between the Forth and the Tyne, and were probably composed between 1350 and 1550. They were superseded by the new poetry introduced by Wyat and Surrey with its personal note. " Q," who deals faith- fully, though not unsympathetically, with modem ballads, concludes that the old ballads were high and sincere poetry; but, as compared with the poems of Spenser and Milton, they were as children to grown men. " They cannot scale the great poetical heights any more than mere innocence can scale the great spiritual heights." The lecture on " The Horatian Model " may be profitably compared with Sir Henry Newbolt's less friendly treatment of Horace. " Q " places Conington at the head of translators. Horace's real magic lies in his Odes ; the secret of the Satires and Epistles has been recap- tured far more successfully by English imitators from early times. Their comparative failure to reproduce the magic of the Odes— though exception is made of some of the sonnets of Milton and Marvell's wonderful Ode on C iuwell's Return from Ireland—is ascribed to their inability to recognize that Horace was at times serious, but most of all to metrical flat-footedness. They did not
• Stud*" Ix Lfterefues. By Sir Arthur Quiller-Conch, BLA„, Fellow of Jesus Gallego, King Edward VII. Professor of Literature in the University of Ciuobridge. Cambridge : at the Vohs:shy Roe. ed. net.1
realize that Horace " chose the most tantalizingly difficult foreign metres and with consummate skill tamed them to the Latin tongue." " Q " rejoices that in the battle of rhyme v. no-rhyme, Daniel won the day over Campion. But Campion was the better poet, and " Q " finds in him and in Collins's " Ode to Evening " strong ground for commending to would-be translators " the experiment of render- ing the Horatian genius in delicate metres divorced from rhyme." He is convinced that Horace's secret, " though it may never be captured in that way, will be captured in no other." The plea for the dismissal for a while of the terms " classical " and " romantic " from our vocabulary is spirited and sensible. In high poetry the two elements are almost invariably present. Greek and Roman literature are full of romance—Homer especially. And the laxity of usage reaches its climax in applying the term " classical " to Pope, who had no classical simplicity, but was a master of convention and steeped in artificiality.
Three chapters are devoted to Donne and the Mystics—Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, and Quarles. Donne, in " Q's " view, was great as a poet but greater in his sermons. As a Mystic he was imperfect, because he was incapable of the " wise passiveness " in which the soul of the true Mystic awaits the message, " the news from a foreign country," without striving and crying. He was too intellectually restless, the slave of his wit and of the fascination of corruption. In the poetry of George Meredith " Q " finds a philosophy austere though suffused with love and a fearless trust in youth. Meredith's master-secret is the love of Earth, but Earth as a Stoic mother. " Q " admits and does not extenuate Meredith's occasional obscurity, but pronounces " Love in the Valley" to be " the topmost poem of its age," sharing with Spenser's " Epitha- lamion " the claim to be " the greatest song of human love in the language." So he does nothesitate to call Mr. Hardy's Dynasts " the grandest poetic structure planned and raised in England in our time." And he finds in Mr. Hardy, who did not regularly commence poet till he was fifty-five, a powerful if not altogether convincing disproof of the theory that poets grow desiccated with age. Yet in " this most genuine and autochthonous of living writers," along with an indignation that is often chivalrous and noble, he discovers something approaching a mania for irony, and a " childless and unhopeful creed," which can detect no purpose, or no beneficent one, in the order of the Universe. The failure of Coleridge to repeat the miracle of "The Ancient Mariner" can, in "Q's " view, be " more charitably set down to a divine exhaustion than charged upon his frailties." This study is one in which admiration gee: hand-in-hand with compassion : it is animated by the spirit, not of Haitlitt, but of Lamb. It is noteworthy also for the critical acumen with which " Q " supports his view that Coleridge gave more to Wordsworth than he received. Matthew Arnold's great services to criticism as a " deliberate disinterested art," his close affinity to the Latin spirit, his felicity, dignity, and his limitations as a poet, are brought out in a short but discriminating study. " He was not a bard ; not a Muse-intoxicated man." But he was a genuine poet who wrote poetry " we can trust, not to flatter us, but to sustain, console." And if " something of the worldling" in him forbade fervour, " there never was a finer worldling than Matthew Arnold." In a lively essay on Swinburne " Q " says ditto to Mr. Geese : there is no evidence of his having read the later volume of the letters edited by Messrs. Hake and Compton-Rickett. He even goes so far as to say that Mr. Watts-Dtmton " averted tragedy only by turning the last thirty years [of Swinburne's life] into comedy, and rather absurd comedy." There is a good paper on Charles Reads, to whom " Q " allows greatness, courage, and " a true apical daemon," hampered by fatal faults of taste and temper and conduct, and a perverse reliance on facts instead of Nature ; and the volume is concluded by two studies on Patriotism in English Literature, in which " Q " insists that " we do not in our true hours brag of England as a world power actual or potential," but " habitually narrow and intensify our national passion upon the homes and the hearths now to be defended."
As a postscript we may be allowed to correct a small error. It was Frederick Locker, not Laurence Oliphant, who wrote " Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly." And is not " Q " somewhat unfair in falling foul of Vaughan for the phrase " stars shut up shop " It was not vulgar when it was written, any more than " fire out " in Shakespeare's sonnet
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