The Literary Pages of the " Spectator (Last week We reviewed

the literature dealt with in our columns from 1828 to 1875: the concluding section which brings the survey up to date will appear in our next issue.— ED. "Spectator.")

1876-1900.

THE last quarter of the nineteenth century was an age of disintegration. We are apt to think of our own age as predominantly an age of broken stan- dards; but we have no such exclamatory and cunning attacks on our moral comfort as the later Victorians suffered under. Decadence and 'aestheticism must have been infinitely horrifying to them. At first it seemed that the tendency might be exploded with laughter ; but it reasserted itself, growing more influential, more badgering, and more corrupt.

PATER AND THE " DECADENTS."

The Spectator could fight an open opponent, but the Decadents were too elusive. It was of no use to clarify and reassert the old arguments ; the weapon of thought itself seemed to be inapplicable. At the same time the Decadents were a social factor ; they were no mere sporadic fools whose influence. could be neglected. In these circumstances we find the Spectator in two minds. If there was an issue of theory Which could be dealt with by the ordinary rules of sound controversy, it brought up its battery. It had, for example, good and sound things to say against Walter Pater's sensationalism ; his tendency "to make each of us cherish and foster, and congratulate ourselves upon, our sweet physical suscep- tibilities." Where there was no such clear, definite, and philosophic point, it kept for the most part a stony silence.

The Spectator, therefore, never gave so clear a leading in this period as it had given in the old days. For the first time it began expressing the views of an older gene- ration, rather than commenting, with whatever sternness and sobriety, on the whole contemporary face of English letters. The position was difficult enough. The decadent movement did not begin here and leave off there ; it filtered through to men who to all appearance were not to be identified with it, and in modes in which it was hard to pin down, or even to recognize. Stevenson, for example, had much of the spirit of decadence in him, though to outward view he was unobjectionable. The Spectator felt his febrility without analysing it. Some- times, however, it made mistakes of identification, as when it saw in Henry James an air of" moral malaria."

Another difficulty was the fact that the Spectator had already swallowed Swinburne ; yet it was Swinburne who brought at his back Wilde and Pater and the Yellow Book. We looked for allies in the wrong place and felt that Mr. William Watson was the chief. representative of the glories of English poetry, leading a perverse genera- tion back to the true worship and over-praised, for the same reason, the rhetoric of Stephen Phillips. None the less the decadent movement was not the only social factor in contemporary literature. There were still the old giants, there were still writers appearing who were untouched by decadence. And in dealing with these the Spectator displayed its old solidity and quick, sane appreciation.

THE COMING OF J. S. LOE STRACHEY: The two editors continued to be the mainspring of the paper. They did not only take the utmost care over contributions ; • an amazing amount of the paper came from their own pens. On the average there were two articles a week from each of them. For some time 11.H. Asquith also wrote a weekly letter ; he severed, his connexion with the paper at the end of 1885, when he entered into active politics. He was followed by a yomig man who had recently come down from Oxford and vlas reading for the Bar—J. St. Loe Strachey. The keen and, vivid mind of Strachey, the extraordinary ,interest he dis- played in everything under the sun, his literary enthu- siasm and taste, met with immediate success.

, The poetry columns Of the Spectator had lickun to assume greater importance. In the earlier part of the century poetry was still something, of a make-weight in a' weekly paper. Often enough it was a mere political - sentiment in verse ; anonymous and deserving no special mention in indexes. The great influence of the Victorian poets, and the regard in which tLey were held,- had changed this attitude. In the second half of the century there were poems in the Spectator by Swinburne, Tennystli, Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Robert Bridges,, John Addington Symonds, Austin Dobson, and J. K. S: Canon Beeching and Mr.. C. L. Graves also contributed: frequently to the poetry columns ; the Spectator first' published Mr. A. P. Graves' celebrated "Father O'Flynn." And, of course, there was Mr. William Watson, whose lyrics and odes appeared week in, week out. Two other famous poems which first appeared in the Spectator were Sir Henry Newbolt's "Clifton Chapel" and Mr, Hilaire Belloc's "The South Country." Among reviewers and article writers were Edmund Gosse, Professor Saintsbury, Rev. A. J. Butler, Wilfred Ward, Andrew. Lang, Mrs. Oliphant, Charles. Whibley and Mr. E. V. Lucas.

RECONSIDERATION OF THE GIANTS. •

It was a time of deaths r.:-d obituary notices ; the time when critical appreciation was most on its mettle and achieved its huist rOunded judgments. TheSpertatOrliad repented heartily over Dickens, defended him now against those who profi:ssed to see a falling off in the work of his later days, and when he died published an excellent and well-considered leading article on his genius. In 1886, an author died whom the Spectator had regarded with the greatest hopes. In their obituary article they confessed : "From the publication of Ravenshoe, Henry Kingsley accom- plished nothing worthy of his genius. We know little of his personal history, but we imagine, from the few notices we have seen of it, that he was one of those men on whom any pecuniary necessity for writing acted as a bewildering spell, depriving him of the spontaneity and driving him back on his memory, and therefore upon resources already used up. His humour degenerated into rollicking absurdity, his perception of character grow fitful, and his plots, never very probable except in Geoffrey Harays, which has, indeed, no more plot than any other family history, became complicated with impossible or preposterous incidents, until the public grew wearied, and the present. writer is probably the only man who ever followed his pen through . a descending series of works steadily to the end, and felt rewarded for a toilsome effort by a few pages in which he detected the old power of charm."

Browning was in worse disgrace than ever : • " There is, we fear, no more fatal sign Of intellectual' deteriora- tion than the substitution of scorn for reason, and it is a mortifida... tion to those who have for years taken delight in Mr. Browning's genius to be compelled to kiss the dust On his behalf now. But it is time to speak out. Were the failure any real loss of mental power we might well keep a sorrowful silence, but there are lima . . which prove that the fire of true genius, though smouldering fitfully, is not extinct. .. It is over . the poet's* spirit, over his attitude towards his fellowmen, a change has passed. We would make himself a judge. Though unfortunately among the number upon whom the poet's housemaid is to the present writer. has studied diligently nearly every ay or "ucf slope, ten years the writings of him who—must we say T—has been a great poet."

It Vtift.3 not only his aloof and mighty. scorn that irritated them, now that his reputation was Unshakable he was giving himself still greater liberties in his individualistic, unkempt and careless use of language : "He has trampled upon his mother tongue with the hoofs of buffaloes, and played such fantastic tricks with its syntax, 'prosody and idiom that it requires all the noble poems with which he has enriched and adorned the English 'language ` to weigh against the deep treason of these unparalleled offences.'" Rossetti was not quite so wellregarded as he had been at his first appearance. When his Ballads and Sonnets *ere published the reviewer said : "'He sighs like a furnace,'—there is no mistake at all about that ; but are his sonnets really ' passionate ' ? In our belief, they are not." Swinburne, too, writing now in a quite mechanical ecstasy, was severely handled :

"The defect with which Mr. Swinburne started, namely, the want of knowledge and interest in men and their surroundings, and an uncordinated love for the jingle and gurgle of words, became more and more noticeable in each succeeding volume. It has now reached a climax past which we think it cannot go, for he has almost taken to reprinting his verse from one volume into the other."

There were acute remarks on Carlyle :

"Carlyle not only regards vehemence as the test of earnestness, but he sees everything he describes through the microscope of a vehement temperament ; and the effect of this is that he exaggerates the quieter and soberer, as well as the more powerful qualities of man—makes altogether too much, not only of power, but of , weakness, not only of fiery qualities, but of watery qualities, carries his imputations of formalism to excess, travesties all formula till it becomes mere Chinese mandariian, makes pallor More pallid than the reality, dryness drier, as well as strength more gigantesque."

We have referred already to the Spectator's dislike for Walter Pater. Of his interpretation of the Greeks in his own image—sensuous, thin, and over-sweet—it wrote : "To speak the frank truth, we find this kind of thing so unreal as to be annoying." It dealt with him more fully in a leading article :— " But if the impression is the beginning and end of the matter, —if the flux of impressions, as so often happens, makes up a man,— if a man goes about glorying in his susceptibilities, hugging himself because he has had that delicious sense of languor as he gazes on the daffodil sky,—feeling himself but a little lower than the angels because he was sensible of the glory of the Alpine storm, while so many others never even interrupted their table d'hôte to glance at it,—recording every shade of namby-pamby tenderness in which his unreal passion for some rural beauty died away,— preening his susceptibilities as a bird preens his plumage,— enshrining himself in his aesthetic exclusiveness of feeling as a god in the golden cloud of Olympus,—then we see that he is going the straight road to cast himself,—we will not say to the dogs,— but to the Zephyrs, which are a great deal more prone than the dogs to make spoil of that common life which is most worth living for, the strongest and the manliest part of human nature."

WILDE, STEVENSON AND HENRY JAMES. •

When Oscar Wilde's poems were published, the reviewer began by saying "The reading of this book fills us with alarm," and ended : "Mr. Oscar Wilde is no poet, but a cleverish man who has an infinite con- tempt for his readers." Stevenson, as we have seen, was never thoroughly approved. An Inland Voyage was commended within reason :

"Mr. Stevenson's style is founded on some of our earlier writers, but it has a distinct flavour of its own. Tastes differ, and The Inland Voyage is not a book to charm everybody, but readers who like it at all will like it very much."

Townsend himself, however, could never understand the vogue for Stevenson, and refused to admit that his novels were great as imaginative literature.

There was a welcome for Henry James which gradually but surely turned to disapproval. Roderick Hudson was given a short but expectant review. "American novels have mostly something characteristic about them. The personages are distinctive, though it often happens that the distinctiveness lies in the opposition to, rather than the harmony with, the national character." When the next volume appeared he was hailed with delight. "It is pleasant to see the promise of a new figure in English—or perhaps, we should rather say, in Anglo- American—literature." The review of The Europeans reached the high water-mark of praise and at the same time foreshadowed the decline : "We cannot exactly Compliment him on the plot. The little there is of it is essentially disagreeable." By the end of the century he was under the full weight of its anger. The reviewer of The Soft Side was very harsh :— " Do you know, dear Mr. Beaton,' remarks the heroine, 'that you make me very sick ? ' and the plain person, wearied some- what of Mr. James's perfect detachment while engaged in his analysis of the odious, welcomes the outburst with enthusiasm."

HARDY AND HENLEY.

Thomas Hardy received praise from the beginning. The review of Far from the Madding Crowd had pleased him, and Leslie Stephens wrote to congratulate him : "The Spectator has really a great deal of critical feeling. I always like to be praised by it." His novels continued to meet with praise, and the Spectator had a large hand in assuring his fame. At the same time, it took exception to his " realism " ; of Two on a Tower the reviewer said : "it is melodramatic without strength, extravagant without object, and objectionable without truth."

Henley's early verses were accepted with gratitude. His Song of the Sword was received with an equal measure of praise and persiflage. The reviewer applied to it Heine's words on Berlioz : "There is a flapping of wings, but it is not of an ordinary bird ; it is a colossal nightingale, a skylark of the grandeur of an eagle, as it existed, it is said, in the primitive world." His verses, the reviewer said, approximate more closely to screaming than singing, and followed this by the just observation : "He is like the professional athlete who, not content with proving his strength by actual achievement, is forever showing his muscles and dilating his chest."

BUTLER AND DOUGHTY.

There was a long and whole-hearted appreciation of the anonymous Erewhon, and it is strange to recall that the Spectator accepted for its columns Samuel Butler's famous satirical poem "A Psalm to Montreal." Stevenson, in pique with the Spectator, used to refer to it as "my grandmother " ; but it was often ready to praise and even print works which seemed to run counter to its ordinary canons.

Another book which it helped to bring to notice was C. M. Doughty's Arabia Deserta. When it was published in 1888 two whole pages were given to it. In the course of his article the reviewer said : "It is the highest tribute we can pay to Mr. Doughty to own, that with the charm of Burkhardt and Burton, Palgrave and Palmer undiminished upon us, we judge his book to be the most remarkable record of adventure and research which has been published in this generation."

CONRAD AND WELLS.

Kipling was praised when he was almost unknown in England ; but perhaps a more immediate and thorough recognition was given to Joseph Conrad. The Spectator called him, without cavil, a writer of genius. It said, however : "His choice of themes, and the uncompromising nature of his methods, debar him from obtaining a wide popularity." When Lord Jim was published, the reviewer spoke of it as "The most original, remarkable and engrossing novel of the season." "G. B. S." in those days was chiefly occupied with Fabian Essays, playwriting and journalism, and he was almost unnoticed in the Spectator. Mr. H. G. Wells, however, was quickly singled out. He seemed throughout to the Spectator to take too low and mechanical a view of human nature and for this it reproached him. It drew attention none the less to his great talents and when The Time Machine was published it was made the subject of a leader. The writer ended by saying : "Mr. Welles fanciful and lively dream is well worth reading, if only because it will draw attention to the great moral and religious factors in human nature which he appears to ignore." (To be concluded.)