SIR EDWARD COOK'S LITERARY RECREATIONS.• SIR EDWARD COOK has long
been a standing disproof of the pessi- mistic saying that journalism is the grave of literary ambition. It is true that he is perhaps best known in the world of letters for the admirable work he has done since his release from editorial labours— his Life of Florence Nightingale and his study of Delano. But as editor in suocession of the Westminster Gazette and the. Daily News he was faithful to the high ideals of the chapter on " Litera- ture and Modern Journalism." And he had already been long engaged on the monumental and exhaustive edition of Ruskin's works, which is perhaps his chief title to remembrance. A remark- able by-product of these studies is to be found in the eighth of these " Recreations "—the essay on Turner's indebtedness to the poet]] and his own efforts in verse—an essay which not only reveals an extraordinarily minute investigation of Turner's literary mottoes, and a thorough familiarity with the poets laid under requisition, but develops with curious insight and delicacy a spiritual parallelism between Turner and Shelley. Turner borrowed freely from Thomson and Byron, whose mind, in Ruskin's phrase, he some- times endeavoured to delineate. But, as Sir Edward Cook shows in a series of apt quotations from "Queen Mab," " Alastor," "Prometheus," and "Julian and Maddalo," Shelley had been simul- taneously illustrating Turner's painting, in its transition to his second and more aerial period, " though the poet had never seen the pictures nor did the painter know the poems." As for Turner's own efforts, Sir Edward Cook makes good his contention that, in spite of indistinctness, awkwardness, the lack of logic and of the feeling for beauty, even for coherence in words, he had the imagi- nation of a poet. "His images were sometimes fine and appropriate." He now and then achieved a golden phrase, as when he calls Sagit- tarius " the fierce archer of the downward year," but he was "never. able to keep at one level for more than a line or two." Turner's life- long persistence in the effort to write verse is explained partly by his obstinate pride and constant ambition ; but a more compelling motive is found in the instinct of self-expression, the ()raving to escape the artist's sorrow, as set forth in Browning's wonderful explanation of " Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture." In the dissuasion of the rival theories of the claims of music and poetry to be the type and measure of all the arts, Sir Edward Cook reaches perhaps a higher level of vision and amore delicate sympathy with the magic of atmosplrere than in any of his other studies. Of the essays in literary criticism, that on "The SecondThoughts of Poets," as illustrated by the process of revision, is the longest and the most fascinating. The frankness, and on the whole the remarkable felicity, of Coleridge in self-criticism-is admirably shown in the examination of " The Ancient Mariner." Tennyson's fastidious' care in revision is abundantly justified, and Sir Edward Cook does well to remind us that though Lockhart's review in the Quarterly of April, 1833, " was in large part as ponderously silly, brutal, and unfair as Tennyson declared . . with hardly an exception, every piece or line which Lockhart had guyed was either suppressed or rewritten." And the • Likwery • Rarcatiow. By Sir Edward Cook. London : Macmillan and CO. 17s, ed, net.]
examination of the retouchings of their poems by Keats and Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, FitzGerald (pace Swinburne, who called him " an ass of genius " for cutting out his favourite stanza in the first edition of Omar Khayyam), and Myers, in the main leads point to the assertion that " many of the words and phrases which might seem most inspired or ` inevitable ' were, in fact, second thoughts."
There is a delightful and entertaining paper—" A Study in Superla- tives "—on class-lists of excellence : the best books, authors, lines, poems ; showing the extraordinary divergences of opinion between eminent critics. Even where the field of choice is restricted, as for example to the order of merit of Keats's Odes, or of Tennyson's poems, no two critics are agreed. In regard to Tennyson, Sir Edward Cook quotes, with silent approval, Frederic Myers's,ohoice of the ode " To Virgil," after mentioning Swinburne's preference for the stanzas beginning " Oh that 'twere possible," and Tennyson's own choice ; and happily asks " Is there any other case than this of Tennyson in the history of English literature, where it may be a question of reasonable discussion whether a poet's best piece was written at the age of twenty-six, of thirty-eight, or of seventy-six Y " The evolution of Ruskin's style is traced in an essay founded on unsurpassed knowledge of the subject. Ruskin had extraordinary natural gifts, but he carefully cultivated and disciplined them, with the result that his style in hie- middle and later works was chastened and purged of exuberanoe. " He not only had something of his own to say, but he said it in his own way and took great pains in the saying of it." Sir Edward Cook is never content with assertion, and gives excellent proof by quoting the successive references to the famous Ilaria of Querola at Lucca. Ruskin did not play the "sedulous ape" like "R. L. S.," but he strove to cure himself of conscious display ; revision was always improvement with him, and he acted faithfully on his maxim that sincerity presupposed a self-concealing art. Sir Edward Cook dwells judi- cially on the advantages and drawbacks of Ruskin's preference for the study of original authorities as compared with oommentaries thereon. And he sympathizes with Ruskin's resentment against those who regarded him first and het as a word-painter. He was that, but he was muoh else, because his descriptions embodied the general laws of Nature ; he wee something of a botanist, and more of a geologist and mineralogist, and he was a most laborious and industrious draughtsman to boot. " I doubt if he ever sat down to describe anything with his pen which he had not spent hours in drawing with his pencil." Hence, at his descriptive best, he excels other authors, not merely in eloquence and rhythm, but in conveying more facts and more, or more significent, thoughts.
"Fifty Years of a Literary Magazine," reprinted from the Jubilee number of the Cornhil/ (January, 1910), is an illuminating survey
of the fortunes of that famous periodical, rich in anecdotic and bibliographic interest. Thaokeray's first six numbers included contributions, besides his own and Tennyson's, from Matthew Arnold, Charlotte and Emily BrontS, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, Tom Hood, Washington Irving, Charles Lever, G. H. Lewes, Lytton, George Macdonald, Monokton Milner], Laurence Oliphant, Adelaide
Procter, Father Prout, Ruskin, •Fitzjames Stephen, Anthony Trol-
lope, and (among artists) Leighton and Millais. Well may Sir Edward Cook ask : " Did ever a first volume make a braver show t "
Yet he winds up on an optimistic note. " There is still the Thaokeray touch ; still the Carnhtill note," and though there are now fewer literary magazines, " in the magazines there is as much literature."
We have left over two articles which no one who writes a memoir or a book can afford to neglect. The first•is on the Art of Biography, and the second on that of Indexing. Sir Edward Cook is a master of both arts, and what he has to say is the outcome of great practical experience and wide range of reading, expressed with the lucidity and sobriety whioh never fail him. He is a great diffuser of dry light ; but there is a cure of humanism at the back of all he writes, and his study of biography ends with an eloquent passage on the text that the Lives best worth writing from some points of view are those which nobody will read, and which, therefore, are seldom written. " The Lives for whioh a loud demand creates a constant supply are of the people who have made open mark in the world ; but they are not always those whioh are inherently most memorable."
The fascination of the D.N.B. resides "not so much in the apt and
lucid biographies of the more famous men ; but rather in those of many of the lesser known, men whose lives have never formed the subject of biography elsewhere, but who disclose unexpected points of vivid oddity or otherwise of marked character; or of men, again, whose capacities found no favouring tide of oircumetarioe."
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