BOOKS.
MR. CHTIRTON COLLINS'S ESSAYS.* THE closing passage in the essay on the "Predecessors of
Shakespeare" will at once arrest and retain the interest of those who are given to speculate upon the curious and preg- nant close of our Victorian dramatic age. "Such was the condition of the English drama," Mr. Charton Collins writes, after a summary to which we shall further allude,—
" When Shakespeare entered upon his career. It had attained, as we have seen, a high point of poetical and rhetorical excellence in the hands of Marlowe and Peele. By Greene it had been brought into contact with ordinary life, but with ordinary life in its romantic aspects. Lyly had enriched it with wit and fancy. The author of Arden of Faversham bad divorced it from poetry and romance, and taught it to become simply realistic. It remained for Shakespeare to combine, and in combining to per- fect, all these elements. Nothing can shake the supremacy of that mighty genius. Nothing can diminish the immense interval which separated him in the maturity of his powers from the most gifted of his predecessors and contemporaries. And yet, when we reflect on what had been accomplished during the period which we have been passing under review, it is impossible not to be struck with the extent of his indebtedness to those who preceded him. Everything had, as it were, been made ready for his advent. The tools with which he was to work had been forged ; the patterns on which he was to work had been designed ; the material on which to work had been prepared."
In language so closely analogous to this is reference now frequently made to the present aspect of our dramatic literature, that one may almost read into it, with altered names, the curious phenomena of our time. The Ibsens and the Pineros, so absolutely different in their views and treat- ment of stage-work from the playwrights who have gone before them, seem rather to pose before us as the heralds and the pioneers of something strong and original to come, than as themselves having accomplished and crowned the revolu- tion. The translations from Ibsen have made him well
known amongst us, but he is foreign to our ways of life. But Pinero, and in their lesser way Mr. Grundy and Mr. Jones, produce work which is of its kind both suggestive and new, while Mr. Davidson the poet, though amongst the unacted, has shown himself the master and originator of a dramatic form of his own. A dramatist who could combine the advantages and resource of their methods, and weave them with a magic of his own, would reveal to us at last
the coming man, who seems to be so generally anticipated as almost to assure us of his approaching advent. What has been once, may be again ; and the young Shakespeare may be watching and amongst us who is to profit by all these strange ex- cursions into the vague. If he comes, let us pray that he may not be a Celt ; or the Saxon's last straw is quenched, and his last hope gone. But it is curious to reflect how the coming genius may be able to weld a composite whole out of the perplexing elements of discouragement and hope of advance and of reaction which constitute our modern world. He has a strange chance before him, which will be aided by what seems to us another definite reaction in favour of the drama as against the noveL Mr. Henry James is the latest instance of the literary man who, with no natural gifts in the dramatic way, cannot resist the temptation of whioh the new emoluments are not the smallest part, of turning his talents to the stage. But this is going beyond Mr. Collins, though it is the practical outcome of the thoughts upon his admirable review of what led up to Shakespeare, as convincing in its logical array as a marshalling of the precursors of the French Revolution. The article first appeared in the form of a review of Mr. Symonds's book upon the subject, published eleven years ago, and Mr. Collins expresses a graceful regret for any strictures upon his work that may appear severe now that we have lost him. But such an expression is unnecessary, as the vital points of difference remain the same, embodied as they are in the one fact of contrast between the school of Swinburne, with its "turbid intemperance of judgment and purely sensuous conception of the nature and scope of art," not unaccompanied by certain "characteristic modes of ex- pression, his hyperbole, his wild and whirling verbiage, his plethora of extravagant and frequently nauseous metaphor " ; and Mr. Collins's calmer region of thought. For instances of Mr. Symonds's excesses we are referred to his descrip- tion. of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, as "that divinest
• Buoys end Studies. By J. Churton Collins. London : Macmillan and Co.
dithyramb in praise of sensual beauty in which the poet moves in a hyperuranian region, from which he con- templates, with eyes of equal admiration, the species of terrestrial loveliness." "An asp, short, ash-coloured, poison- fanged, blunt-headed, abrupt in movement, hissing and wriggling through the sands of human misery," would not, at sight, be accepted as the description of a play, and "the lust for the impossible being injected like a molten fluid into all Marlowe's eminent dramatic personalities," is certainly a violent way of describing Mr. Collins's own view, that Marlowe was not by nature a dramatist. But, in truth, the opposition between the two views of criticism which rely in the main, one upon language, and the other upon reasoning, has always been severely hostile; and the dangers of the one are in their way as great as those of the other. One great temptation of the reasoner is to whitewash a black sheep, literary or historical ; and the three whom in this volume Mr. Collins has especially selected for the process are Greene, Theobald, and Lord Chesterfield.
To the charm of Greene's poetry and gift of story-telling we had occasion to allude a few weeks ago, in reference to the old charge against Shakespeare of having freely conveyed him to his own uses ; but apart from his appreciation of the poet's position in that respect, Mr. Collins is anxious to defend him against the charge which Greene has brought against himself and the life that he lived at Cambridge and afterwards. The chief ground of the critic's defence is that Greene's work was singularly free from stain, and that he did far too much work to find time to be dissolute. Both pleas are rather inadequate against Greene's own confessions, for which even a morbid state of mind and religious mania can hardly account ; but neither their truth nor their falsehood avails anything now to affect the position of the poet and the dramatist, nor is it therefore possible to feel much interest in the discussion. The extent to which hia graceful and imaginative verse aided in the Shakespearian inspiration is a different thing altogether. To whitewash Lord. Chesterfield is an undertaking of another kind. That great man, if the truth be told of him, is really nothing if not cynical, and great alone as a kind of domestic Machiavelli. Of the influence of fiction upon the popular estimate of character many instances are to be found ; but we cannot agree with Mr. Collins in thinking that Barnaby .Rv,dge had anything to do with making his lordship odious, or, indeed, that any but the mildest percentage of Dickens's readers- connect Lord Chesterfield and Sir John Chester in any appreciable way. We are much more inclined to resent the essayist's attack upon "the unspeakable vulgarity and absurdity of Dickens's caricature and travesty," than we-
are to accept his pleas for Chesterfield's morality. They are, of course, based upon the publication of the new edition of the letters by the late Lord Carnarvon, with such new lights upon the letter-writer's character as the papers issued for the first time, may throw. But somehow it all comes to us as special pleading, leaving Lord Chesterfield very much where he was in his refined depravity, and by no means to be compared to. Polonins as a father giving advice to a son. To describe Lord Chesterfield in rhetorical epithets of the Swinburnian school would be in some sense to turn Mr. Collins's argu- ments against himself ; and some of the very characteristics of that school which incense him would incense its members against Lord Chesterfield. If that nobleman was not the man he is proverbially believed to be, he seems to lose hie raison d'être. If his self-revelations are more involuntary than Greene's, they are probably the more trustworthy.
To turn to Theobald is to tread on different ground. If the " Porson of Shakespeare," the name which Mr. Collins gives him, be perhaps a little ambitious, here, at all events, there is a good lance to break. The men whom Pope singled out for his abuse start with a presumption in their favour, for the keenness of his shafts was almost in inverse proportion to their objects' deserving. We do not agree with Mr. Collins that those stinging couplets have destroyed their victims in the world's opinion. His satire literally blasts, he says, the characters which it has touched, and he instances Colley Cibber as "the author of one of the most delight- ful autobiographies ever written, and a comedy which is in its way a masterpiece," but with a memory impotent against it. Now, we question this altogether. Much as poor Cibber may have suffered at the time, we doubt
if the receipts of his comedy were a penny the worse for it, and to the student of dramatic history the figure of Gibber remains quite characteristic and untouched, save, perhaps, by a mild wonder that Pope should have aimed so very wide. All the Popes in the universe can make nobody vote him dull. And as for Addison ? Mr. Collins wisely, but rather weakly, passes him over without comment, for the most lachrymose student amongst us will not now weep one tear because" Atticus was he," but calmly conclude that be was not. Theobald was a capital Shakespearian and a ripe scholar in Greek as well as English, as Mr. Collins shows. But, of course, no pure scholar and commentator can attain to the standard of an original worker like Cibber or Addison, be- cause their reputation depends on what they did themselves, not on their remarks on what others did. So Theobald has suffered from Pope's enmity more than his fellows did; but he has suffered also in common with the vast number of scholiasts who have not been able to resist the fascination of tampering with the Shakespearian text, though we cannot be too often reminded, as Mr. Collins again reminds us, that but for commentators and editors no play of Shakespeare's would ever have come down to us at ail. In his magnificent carelessness of reputation as of chronology and nomenclature, the poet who was ready to call a masterpiece of wit and poetry Twelfth Night or As You Like It, or anything anybody sug- gested, to christen an Illyrian Sir Andrew Aguecheek, to send Bohemia to the seaside, and to engage Giulio Romano to execute a statue of a lady acquitted by the oracle of Delphi—took no trouble whatever with his manuscripts after he had once given them to the prompter. They became the prompter's business then, not his. So the Shakespearian text as we know it has been constructed, fortunately with the vast body of it safe beyond cavil, out of a quantity of guesses more or less lucky, which nevertheless can be but guesses. As to what Mr. Collins says of Theobald's, some will agree in one place, and some in another, and some not at all. We do not our- selves, for instance, particularly appreciate the famous guess about Falstaff's "babbling of green fields" on his death-bed. It is not like Falstaff, and it is very unlike Mrs. Quickly. We are more inclined to think that a much more prosaic guess, made, we forget by whom, that "his nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze," suggests much more of probability, while we can be pretty sure that Shakespeare himself wrote neither. We fully agree with Mr. Collins that some of Theobald's emendations are of striking merit, though his remark that Lear's fantasies are those of real madness, and Edgar's only assumed, which meets with Mr. Collins's approval, strikes us as more obvious than profound. What else could anybody say ? And the happiest of Theobald's guesses are really not happier than were some of those of poor Collier, which had in their favour the most remarkable of internal evidence, though they were dismissed with con- tumely as clumsy forgeries. But the Theobald paper is well worth reading, and the comparison with Porson is scholarly and suggestive, while the perpetual interest in literary war lends attractiveness to the part about Warburton, and the calm use he made of Theobald's work and name under Pope's protecting xgis. A paper on Menander, and a biographic sketch of Dryden, complete the contents of a various volume, full of ripe scholarship and attainment, and suggesting at every point all desirable opportunities for difference and controversy.
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