MR,. G. BARNETT SMITH'S ESSAYS.* TELE eight papers composing this

volume are reprinted from

magazines, a habit with modern writers which is not necessarily blameworthy. The best literary productions of our century, from

the exquisite essays of Elia to the delicate and subtle workmanship of Mr. Matthew Arnold, have appeared in a periodical form, and our popular novelists have told most of their best stories in the pages of monthly serials. The only just objection to the preser- vation of magazine articles in a book is, that they are too slight and insignificant to deserve the honour, an objection that might apply quite as reasonably to half the volumes that are published. Worthless books see the light daily, and die almost as soon as they begin to live ; magazine articles also, fit only for "padding," serve a purpose during their brief life, and are then deservedly forgotten ; but the book that possesses vitality is always welcome, and the same welcome may be given to any collection of serial essays that bears the marks of vigorous thought and careful literary labour.

Mr. Barnett Smith can scarcely be said to satisfy these demands.

The writer has a facile pen and a generous sympathy with literary excellence, his reading is considerable, and his taste catholic, but he strikes us as entirely wanting in originality and critical sagacity. He writes with ease, and the reader who cares to follow him, may do so without difficulty. No exercise of thought is demanded, and much that is said is too obvious to arouse dissent. The best that can be stated of the volume is that it is respectable and common-place. Mr. Smith considers that his studies possess some claim to exhaustiveness, and hopes that they may have a per- manent value :—

"Notwithstanding," he writes, "the favourable reception the essays met with on their original appearance, I might not now have collected them, and endeavoured to give them a 6 local habitation and a name,' but for the fact that I have been repeatedly pressed to do so by numerous individuals—whose tribute (in some cases at least), I cannot but regard as flattering—who were desirous of possessing them in a volume."

We think the " numerous individuals " are mistaken in their judgment, and fear that Mr. Smith will be disappointed in his hope. The novelists whose genius he attempts to estimate are Thackeray, Peacock, Hawthorne, the Brontes, and Fielding ; the poets are Mrs. Browning and Mr. Robert Buchanan. The volume closes with a paper entitled " English Fugitive Poets."

It is difficult to criticise a writer whose pages abound with truisms. We read paragraph after paragraph, agree with what we read, and wonder why it should be written. Don't we all know that the sun gives warmth, that snow is white, and that the property of fire is to burn? And we venture to say there is not an intelligent reader of our literature who is not quite as con- vinced of the obvious truths with which these essays are studded. The monotony of the criticism is, however, a little broken at times, and some of the author's observations or omissions are singular enough to provoke comment Thus, we are not a little startled at seeing Richardson's name placed first on the roll of British humourists of the last century, while Swift's name is omitted, and at reading that Richardson " exhibits little genius." Genius, according to Mr. Smith, is invariably developed in early life. "The fact that Richardson commenced to write at fifty years of age, precludes the idea of his having possessed lofty creative genius; talent may slumber, as in his case, but genius never." He adds some remarks about Clarissa Barlowe, to the effect that the author flings his code of morals at us on every page, so that it is difficult to avoid the idea that • Poets and Novelists: a Series of Literary Studies. By George Barnett Smith. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1875.

we are in church, which make us question whether he has ever read that wonderful story, which Lord Macaulay is said to have known almost by heart, and which Sir James Macintosh con- sidered the finest work of fiction ever written in any language.

Again, it is possible to agree in the main with Coleridge's remarks upon Toni Jones, without accepting Mr. Smith's statement that,

excepting certain phrases " redolent of the period at which Field- ing wrote, it is one of the purest books in our literature." Then we must demur to the remark that "the imaginative faculty is generally the last to reach its width and fulness, and nations have patiently to await its growth for centuries," seeing that a precisely opposite statement would come nearer to the truth. Some of the most highly imaginative poets, with Homer at their head, belong to the early ages of the world's history, and the lofty poetry pre- served in the Old Testament, was also the production of far-off centuries. Neither is Mr. Smith at all times precisely accurate in his facts. It was not Prior's father who kept the Rummer Inn at Charing Cross ; and it can scarcely be correct to class Dryden, who died in the year 1700, amongst the poets of the eighteenth century. Mr. Smith, by the way, like most inexperienced writers,

makes a lavish use of adjectives, and they are not always well applied. There is little discrimination in calling Pope " brilliant," and Dryden " stately," and Cowper "gentle," and it might be possible to praise Mr. Buchanan's Book of Orm without stringing it to six adjectives, like a row of onions. " All the qualities," says the writer, " which are admirable in poetic art find a lodgment to a greater or less degree in the Book of Orm. It has simplicity, grandeur, beauty, sublimity, sweetness,

pathos." On the whole, we incline to think that Mr. Smith's ex- travagant eulogy of Mr. Buchanan is the most pretentious and the feeblest essay in the volume. He considers that " if ever there was an age when the opportunity was given to write epic poems, this is the one," an opinion we need not dispute, since we can but judge of the poetical character of an age by the work achieved in it ; and he remarks that since Mr. Buchanan's genius is epic rather than dramatic " he would be more successful in subduing the individualities to his own grand leading purpose than he would in placing his personages upon the stage." The writer loses his command of language in lauding Mr. Buchanan,

for whose poetry, however, no reader of the Spectator is un- aware that we ourselves have a very high admiration. Thus we are told that the author of London Poems was possessed of this definite idea,—viz., "to get free from the flash and glitter which encrumed the writings et other authors." Mr. Smith does not say what authors ; neither does he inform us, as might seem necessary, how the writings of a poet can be " encrusted with a flash." Still more perplexing is the assertion that though the Drama of Kings cannot, " as an entirety," be so highly praised as

some other of Mr. Buchanan's works, yet that it should be well understood " it is not Mr. Buchanan's poetry which is at fault in this volume ; it is his subject, and his method in the treatment of it." On the poem itself we pass no opinion here ; but the poet, upon reading this comment, may well cry out, " Save me from my friends ! " For to have chosen a bad subject, and to have treated it badly is to have committed an unpardonable sin in poetry, for which no beauty of isolated passages can atone.

Mr. Smith, by the way, to judge from his statement that the attractiveness and grandeur of Scotch scenery were but a shadow and a name to him till he read Mr. Buchanan's glowing descriptions, must have been strangely unimpressed by Sir Walter Scott's vivid pictures of mountain and moorland, of Highland strath and river.

The younger poet has, no doubt, done excellent 'work in this way, which may be enjoyed without forgetting to be grateful to the

masterly workmanship of the great Scotch novelist. And it is surely somewhat preposterous, after thanking Mr. Buchanan for his Tentatives, to exclaim in slovenly English :— " The eagerness which every person displays to learn something of the actual life of our great writers, cannot be founded altogether in a morbid sensationalism. What would we give, for instance, for the de- tails relative to the personnel of Homer and Shakespeare, if written by themselves ? And the same feeling, chastened only in degree, we cherish towards all whose works have enlightened and elevated man- kind. It is the tribute which ordinary humanity pays to genine,—to that quality which stands between them and the Almighty, elucidating the mysteries of the latter, and gathering up for presentation to the Unseen the woes and the hopes of man."

Mr. Smith is apt to write vaguely and incoherently when he writes about poetry. He is full of enthusiasm, and this produces high-sounding phrases which will scarcely bear examination. Mr. Smith's essay on Mrs. Browning is full of terms which must not be scanned too closely, and occasionally we meet with grotesque blunders, as, for instance, when he asks, " Has Pope, or any

other man who taught us how to think in measured cadence, and delighted us with rhyming intellectualism, ever got beyond didactic assertions, and seized that fire which the real Prometheus of song invariably gains? The poet has impulses, gigantic and irresistible ; he has also love, ever operative and inextinguishable. His rhyme is an accident, his poetry is eternal." There is, no doubt, a glimmering of meaning behind this rubbish, and we can guess what the writer wishes to say, but it is an unfortunate sen- tence. If Pope teaches us to think in measured cadence, do not the greatest of poets teach us this also ? " Rhyming intellectual- ism" is not a happy phrase, but it may pass ; not so the state- ment that Pope never got beyond " didactic assertions," which shows a startling ignorance of his poetry. Can Mr. Smith find nothing but didactic assertions in Pope's splendid satires and epistles, or a trace of them in the "Rape of the Lock ?" We may observe, too, that a poet's rhyme, by which we suppose the critic means the form in which he casts his verse, is not more of an accident than the poetry itself, but is as essential to the poet as notation is to the musician. Mr. Smith says a good many things about Mrs. Browning's often exquisite but too often also affected poetry that are perfectly true, but his method of saying them is marked, we think, by poverty of thought and expression.

Witness the following passage :—

" Wandering amongst her poems is like standing in the forest alone, with the wailing wind and the flying rain as the only assurances of an existence sublimer than our own. But the profoundest depth of our heart is reached thereby. We would there bad been no need for the lament and the sorrow, and yet we would not have lost those mysterious thrills of the soul which her power has evoked. We must follow the poet in her quest of truth, follow her wherever she leads us, for by these means shall we emerge out of the thick folds of darkness into the broad light of day. This is one reason why we have such an ad- miration for and attachment to her genius. Wherever she leads us, it is to make us better. Does she show us the poor, whom we too often oppress? It is that we may know wherein we have erred, and that in the future our hands may be washed clean from oppression and cruelty. Does she sometimes apparently darken the spirit? It is only to make it refloat, so that it may endeavour to grope through the mysteries of life and nature np to God. Intellectual doubts are frequently disposed of in a very summary method, and one which has at sundry times in the world's history been most effective ; she sees their lowering forms gradually attenuate and disperse before the calm eye of Faith."

Mr. Smith's account of Nathaniel Hawthorne is not without in- terest, but his criticism on the subtle and singularly complex genius of this remarkable novelist is far from satisfactory. The writer considers the Blithedale Romance Hawthorne's most perfect work, a judgment in which few readers will concur ; aard his arguments in its favour are not likely to make converts. Then one scarcely knows what to say of a critic who thinks it necessary to observe that in Hawthorne the subjective greatly predominated over the objective, and who asserts of the House of the Seven Gables,—" This romance possesses an interest from its general excellence, rather than from any definite, distinctive trait of character or directness of purpose." Mr. Smith remarks that, " compared with the writers of his own country, there is no difficulty in assigning his proper position as a novelist to this illustrious writer," but he scarcely attempts to assign it. The admirer of Hawthorne, however, will probably accept the obvious remark that" it is rare to meet with his artistic qualities anywhere." We have left ourselves no space to remark upon several of the essays contained in this volume, but we may observe in conclusion that the author writes with more pertinence about novelists than poets, and that where his criticism fails, his biographical narrative prevents the paper from becoming tedious. He is hardly a wise critic, but he will not generally be regarded as a dull writer.