MR. GOSSE AND HIS CRITIC.* •

NOBODY who values the decencies of literary life and the courtesies of criticism, will have read without regret the attack made by a writer in the Quarterly Review on Mr. Gosse for his volume of lectures, entitled From Shakespeare to Pope. Under the guise of an article called "English Literature in the Universities," the writer, Mr. Churton Collins, who has now pro- claimed his own identity, and who was once an undergraduate at Ballo' College, Oxford, has indulged in a furious attack not so much on Mr. Gosse's book as on Mr. Gosse himself. The attack would have been considered fierce even during the reign of the "savage and tartarly " style of sixty years ago; to the present generation it may give a fair notion of what the "Grub Street" style of criticism may have been in the days of Dryden and Pope. If Mr. Collins had contented himself with pointing out inaccuracies in Mr. Gosse's book in the customary style—how- ever sarcastically, or even fiercely—he might,, no doubt, have made some very good points. In a work of the kind which Mr. Gosse has published, ranging over a wide field of literature, and fall of casual references and citations and dates referring to little-known authors, Mr. Gosse would have been indeed a marvel if he had not made some blunders. Mr. Gosse is, no doubt, not an adept at l'art de vgrifier les dates. But it is no discredit to a Lecturer on Litera- ture if he is not as exact in his dates as a professed historian or the compiler of an encyclopa3dia ; and a man may well be con- victed of a certain inexactness in such matters as dates and first editions, to the great delight of a triumphant critic, but without the least derogation to his powers as a literary critic or a literary authority. More especially is this the case when his alleged crimes are of the following appalling character. The reviewer, after saying that "however limited a man's reading may be, however treacherous his memory, however slender his abilities" (the italics are ours, because the words are important as showing the animus of the critic), "he has no excuse for making blunders of this kind" (i.e., in dates), goes on, "it is plain that Mr. Gosse, so far from attempting to verify his dates, has not even troubled himself to consult the title-pages of the works to which he refers." And then, among other instances of Mr. Gosse's criminality, is the following :—" Mr. Gosse tells us (p. 234) that Oldham died in 1684." Oh, monstrous fault ! oh, wicked fault ! for "Oldham died "—when ? twenty, thirty, forty years before or after ? No; but—risum. teneatis ?—" in December, 1683." Moreover, the sentence in which the state- ment is alleged to be made is not a statement of the date of Oldham's death, but (and this is the only possible construc- tion, considering the position of the comma) of the date of Dryden's poem on it. And the captions critic of the critic might ask how Mr. Gone could have found out this date by consulting the title-pages of the works to which he refers. The • The Quarterly Review, October. 1886. Article I. London John Murray.— From Shakespeare to Pope: an Inquire into the Causes and Rise of Clasbied Poetry in England. By Edmund Geese. Cambridge: University Press.

next crime is of the same gravity. Fenton is said by Mr. Gosse to have " sung " some verses in 1730. "The verses occur" (the captious reviewer will not tolerate the notion of singing) in an

edition published not in 1730—a hideous and misleading blunder—but in 1729. On p. 110, by the way, Mr. Gosse gives the date himself as 1729. Again, "Mr. Gosse confidently asserted" that Philips's Cyder was written in 1699, whereas it was published, according to Mr. Collins, in 1708, and he endeavours to prove that it could not have been written before 1706 by the fact that it contains an allusion to the consummation of the

Union between England and Scotland, the articles of which were signed July, 1706. We do not profess to say that Mr. Collins's own statement is not correct ; but, at all events, if

Mr. Gosse has made a mistake, according to the Encyclopcedia Britannica Mr. Collins has made one too, for Philips's Cyder

was, according to that work, published in 1706, and not in 1768. It is true that the earliest edition in the British Museum

is 1708, but non coastat there is not an earlier one ; and 1706 is the date given also in Chalmers'e edition. But, after all, these

are trivial matters, and except as showing the animus of the reviewer, who magnifies every mole-hill of inaccuracy into a mountain, are unworthy of notice. It cannot matter to any one on the face of the earth whether these respectable personages published their poems a year or two earlier or later. It is their substance and their sequence which concerned Mr. Gosse as a literary student and literary critic. We should only laugh at the portentous solemnity of a reviewer whose acrimony could level the charge that English literature at Cambridge was gone to the dogs, because a Cambridge lecturer actually misdated by a year or two some obscure poems by obscure authors. But the reviewer is not content with picking holes where at least there is, or seems to be, a thread loose; nor does he confine himself to the inevitable charge of inaccuracy, which Macaulay himself had to meet at the hands of Croker. Mr. Collins goes much further. He deliberately accuses Mr. Gosse of deliberate lying, and of obtaining money as a Lecturer on English Literature under false pretences :—

" Of all offences of which a writer can be guilty, the most detest- able is that of simulating familiarity with works which he knows only at second-hand, or of which he knows no more than the title. That a Lecturer on English Literature should not know whether the Arcadia of Sidney and the Oceana of Harrington are in prose or verse, or, not knowing, should not have taken the trouble to ascer- tain, is discreditable enough ; but that he should, under the impression that they are poems, have had the effrontery to sit in judgment upon them, may well, in Macaulay's favourite phrase, make us ashamed of our species. And yet this is what Mr. Gosse has done. In one place (p. 26), he classes and compares the Arcadia with the Peery Queen. In another place (p. 75), he classes and compares it with Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory and Triumph : while on p. 26, the Oceana, coupled with the Arcadia, is compared on the one hand with Sponsor's poem, and on the other hand with Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island."

We give the text. Mr. Gosse is speaking of the degradation that literature underwent after Shakespeare's death :—

" Poetry began to be written for the poets for the elect, for a circle ; and this was one of the deadly effects oithat curious embargo upon publication of which I have spoken. Utter disregard was paid to unity, to proportion, to extent. In the great generation there had been too little regard for those qualities. Without profanity be it spoken, Sidney's Arcadia is dreadfully amorphous and invertebrate, and Macaulay's difficulty of being in at the death of the Blatant Beast would never have been propounded if the Faery Queen had not been so long, that it is really excusable not to be aware that the Blatant Beast does not die. But if the Arcadia is shapeless, what are we to say of the Oceana ? and let not him call the Faery Queen dull who has never grappled with Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island."

Now, is it not incredible, on the face of it, that a person of Mr.

Gosse's reading should not know, what "every schoolboy knows," that the Arcadia is (in the main) a work in prose, and not in verse. But surely the very fact that the Arcadia is balanced not against another poem, but against a prose work, the Oceana, should have revealed to any one less blinded with prejudice or deter- mined not to see than Mr. Collins, that Mr. Gosse was not guilty of thinking that the Arcadia was a poem. He balances, in the

first limb of the sentence, a prose work of imagination of the "great generation," against another prose work of imagination

of a later generation, the Ocectna ; just as, in the second limb of the sentence, he balances a poem of the "great generation," The Faery Queen, against a poem of a later generation, The Purple Island. The comparison is apt, and the illustration

drawn from the prose works strengthens the illustration drawn from the poems. Nothing but a perverse determination to

follow the evil policy, Omnia in deterius vertere, would have made Mr. Collins start a theory which would be ludicrous were it not that it is so malignant. As to confusing John Haring- ton (not Harrington, oh, exact reviewer !) the poet, with James Harrington, the prose writer, the index which Mr. Collins afterwards uses for his own purposes against Mr. Gosse, gives the reference, "Oceana, by James Harrington." But there is a worse case, in which Mr. Gosse is accused of not having read a poem which be criticises,—Garth's Claremont. Mr. Gosse " in- forms us that Garth's Claremont is a direct imitation of Denham's Cooper's Hill. If he had taken the trouble to read Garth's poem, he would have seen that, beyond the fact that it derives its title from the name of a place, and is written in heroics, it has simply nothing in common with Cooper's Hill." This is an astounding statement. What Mr. Gosse says is, "The Windsor Forest of the one, and the Claremont of the other, are direct imitations of Cooper's Hill ;" and this conjunction clearly shows that Mr. Gosse has read both Garth's poem and Pope's. Garth's own preface shows clearly that he regarded his poem as an imitation of the other two,—" They that have seen those two excellent poems of Cooper's Hill and Windsor Forest, the one by Sir J. Denham, the other by Mr. Pope, will show a great deal of candour if they approve of this. It was written upon giving the name of 'Claremont' to a villa now belong- ing to the Earl of Clare." What can Garth mean, except that he hopes the critics will not be too much " down " on a poem which humbly follows in the wake of two such poems as those of Denham and Pope P It is true that Garth's poem more closely imitates Pope's than Denham's. But they both follow their model. All three refer to the history of the place and the people who dwelt there, and all three introduce perfectly irrelevant, and, as we should think, stupid episodes. Denham's is a stag-hunt, and Pope's is the story of the nymph Lodona, the personified Loddon ; while Garth, following Pope, introduces the story of Montano, the personified Claremont, and Echo. The only differences are that Denham and Pope, having a good deal of historical interest to describe, describe it ; whereas Garth, having little to describe, shirks description by saying the place is too artistically beautiful for his pen ; and further, that Denham and Pope's episodes, though long and draggekin "by the hairs," are episodes, and do not, as their inferior imitator's episode does, form the greater part of the poem. Mr. Collins has conveniently omitted Mr. Gosse's reference to Pope's poem, because he no doubt saw that he could not deny that Garth imitated Pope, or that Pope imitated. Denham, and so could not avoid the inference that the imitation of an imitation is an imitation of the original imitated. But this suppression of the middle term is hardly the course to be adopted by a candid and exact critic. Take one more instance, and we have done. Mr. Collins charges Mr. Gosse with having "on one page called Drayton's Barons' Wars 'a serene and lovely poem ;' on the very next page we are told that a passionate music runs through it ;' and on p. 75 this same serene and. lovely poem' is described as possessing curious brilliant and touching qualities, irregular force, and sudden brilliance of style.'" Now, the statement as to the passionate music refers merely to one episode culled from the poem, consisting in a letter from a dying soldier to his Queen ; and we fail to see how passionate music in one episode is inconsistent with the serenity or loveliness of a poem as a whole. Then, as to the latter passage, will our readers believe

that the description quoted is taken from the following passage? —" The heroic poems of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages,

the Barons' Wars of Drayton, the Albion's England of Warner, the Ovid's Banyuets of Sense of Chapman, for instance, had possessed," &c.; yet Mr. Collins quotes it as if it was applied to Drayton's poem alone.

We have dealt with Mr. Collins's attack on Mr. Gosse only, because the rest of the article, except so much of it as is directed against his successful competitor for the Merton Pro-

fessorship of English Literature and Language at Oxford, is mere cover and padding of the old, old Quarterly style that everything is going to the dogs nowadays, especially literature. The raison d'être of the article is its charge of false pretences against Mr. Gosse, and we can hardly doubt what the verdict of impartial judges will be. Meanwhile, we recommend every lover of readable and interesting work to read Mr. Gosse's book.