A YEAR-BOOK OF THEATRICAL CRITICISM.
Study and Stage. By William Archer. (Grant Richards. 6s.) —Mr. Archer is undoubtedly one of the most capable of living theatrical critics ; his writing is always readable and often brilliant. But it may be doubted if he has done wisely in re- publishing in book form a selection from his contributions to journalism during the past year under the title of "A Year-book of Criticism." "The book," he says, "chronicles such of my critical adventures of the past year as seemed to possess more than an absolutely ephemeral interest." This may be quite true of the adventures, and to do him justice, Mr. Archer says : "I am guiltless of the arrogance of conceiving that in bringing together these despatches, so to speak, of the campaign of 1898, I am laying great bases for eternity." But would not Mr. Archer have been better advised had he taken the plan adopted by Mr. Saintsbury in his admirable" corrected impressions,"—revised his judgments of 1899 at the end of the year, and then published them in a less " ephemeral " form than they at present possess ? Hence this volume cannot be regarded as one of Mr. Archer's truly valuable contributions to literature, or even to the dramatic department of it. At the same time, it contains a great deal of solid journalistic work. His more purely " professional " papers —such, for example, as his estimate of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays and his various Shakespeare studies—are eminently readable, even although one may be disposed to quarrel with some of the views contained in them. Mr. Archer's adventures into purely literary criticism are too suggestive of the amateur. To tell us that "Burns fell a victim, not to Pitt and the eighteenth century, but to that bitter Scotch Puritanism which mule the life of his class so drearily unbeautiful save for such momentary glamour as might be thrown around it by whisky and the 'lasses,'" is not to state a novelty. In more senses than one, too, he strains a point when, dealing with Mr. Hardy's poems, he says : "Subjecting the crude mischances and brutalities of life to the alchymy of an ironic pessimism, he extracts from them a peculiar bitter sweet melancholy which is among the most penetrant of latter-day literary savours."
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