SIR ALFRED LYALL'S LATER ESSA Yaw TUB late Sir Alfred
Lyall had touched life at many points, as a man of action, an administrator, a thinker, a scholar, and a poet, and the wide range of his interests is reflected in this volume, which contains the essays and addresses he wrote or delivered front 1894 onwards. It is true that literary themes predominate, but in every one the criticism is rein- forced by first-hand experience in the arena of action. He had not only lived through the Mutiny, but served with dis- tinction as a volunteer. His Asiolie Studies show how deeply he had penetrated into the mysticism of the East. His poems, amateurish in workmanship, but rich in insight, show an equal appreciation of the fighting man, the philosopher, and the man of the world. And the same manysidedness, though in a mellower form, is to be found in the work of his later years.
Dealing with "Novels of Adventure and Manners"—the easily appeared in the Edinburgh Review of 1894—Sir Alfred Lyall makes a strong point of the influence of the Napoleonic Memoirs. Novelists found their most formidable competitors in the recorders of fact. Concurrently he notes the growth of precise and faithful observation in the women noveliata- with Jane Aueton at their head—who "created the decent story of contemporary life," and, by discarding convention and abandoning mere attitudes for actions studied from life, accomplished for the novel of manners very mach what Scott at the same period did for the novel of adventure. They were, in short, pioneers of Realism and Naturalism. We may also note two judgments which, in the light of the events of the last twenty years, need revision—that women have never succeeded in the novel of adventure, and that they never have yet competed in the sporting novel. In the last twenty years all the best sporting novels, with Some Experiences of on kith ILK at their head, have been written by women. The study of " English Letter-Writing in the Nineteenth Century," an illus- trated in the correspondence of Lamb, Keats, Dean Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Edward FitzGerald, and Stevenson, is marked by the urbanity and sympathy which the subject demands. Here, as always, the writer's special opportunities lend width to his views. For instance, after observing that to fulfil the con- ditions of a fine epistolary style " the language of a country must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with easy diction "—he adds : "it is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic world has given us no such letters the material as well as the intellectual environ- ment is wanting." In treating of the amusing and animated letter-writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century he lays eepecial etreas on the autobiographicid, self-revealing, qualities of the best exponents of the art—Lamb, Coleridge, and Byron. And he does well to remind us of Godwin's claim to grateful reme brance as a pedantic and frigid philosophiser who was yet the cause and subject of some of the most delightful and amusing letters in the English language. But when he goes on to assert that the " sincerity, spontaneity, uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and nature/ unruly affection," that pervade the correspondence of tide period have almost if not quite disappeared, owing to the sterilizing influence of journalism, the lowering of the social temperature, and other causes. Sir Alfred Lyall is indulging in a pessimism hardly warranted by the facts. Good letters are still written, in spite of the typewriter, and the time had not yet come to pronounce letter-writing a dead art. Some of the letters from the trenches are models of natural expression, and the account of the battle off the Falkland Isles, written by a Midshipman of sixteen, published the other day in the Daily News, was a masterpiece of vivid narrative. Sir Alfred Lyall's disappointment with Matthew Arnold's letters is natural, and be finds some happy phrases to express his admiration for those of FitzGerald and Carlyle. Thus of Carlyle he says: "It is this capacity for pouring out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of °nee heart for a friend, whieh, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water mark of English literature," The study of Thackeray is an admirable piece of sound criticism in the main.
• Studies in Iiiiratura and History. By the late Sir Alfred C. LAB. London, John Murray. [10s. 81 itel.] Bat it incurious that Sir Alfred Lyra never even mentions bin verse or The Rose and the Ring, and his disparagement of the .ROundabout Papers seems to us excessive. On the novels, how- ever, Sir Alfred Lyall is a sound guide. He is old-fashioned enough to assert of Barry Lyndon that, in spite of its great excel- lence, the book labours under the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for a hero. Among Thackeray's faults he notices his addiction to moralizing, his anti-clerical prejudice, his rooted hostility to mothers-in-law, and his tendency to caricature meanness and insolence. But Thackersy's great qualities as an artist and humorist have never been more judiciously eulogized. The essay on" The Anglo-Indian Novelist" is in one respect disappointing, since it only makes inoidental reference to Mr. Kipling, and was written two years before the appearance of Kim. But it is valuable, not merely from the authority with which Sir Alfred Lyall writes, but also as a tribute to the excellence of such unjustly forgotten romances as those of Meadows Taylor, William Arnold's Oakfield, the anonymous Pandurang Hari, and Sir Mortimer Durand's Helen Treveryan. In conclusion, Sir Alfred Lyall deprecates the prominence assigned in most Anglo-Indian novels to social activities and the military hero, and holds up Tolstore Les Cosaques as a model for future imitation.
The paper suggested by Professor Ker's great work on Epic and Romance gives an admirable outline of the conditions and essentials of heroio poetry, with special reference to Homer, the Sagas, and the popular songs of the Afghans. Sir Alfred Lyall acutely analyses the differences between the romantic and the heroic styles, and illustrates the inevitable decline of heroic: verse under the influence of civilization and the higher culture. But of all the literary studies none is better than that on Byron, which, without going all the way with Matthew Arnold, strongly dissents from Swinburne's extrava- gant disparagement Byron's personality has been the great stumbling-block in the way of a judicial estimate of his claims to literary immortality. As Sir Alfred Lyall puts it, the present world known more of Byron's private history than of his poems. But, after making liberal deductions for his too exclusively worldly experience, his frequent slovenliness of execution, and his self-consciousness, to mention only a few of the defects dealt with in these pages, Sir Alfred Lyall insists on the splendid and generous use to which Byron turned his travels and observation in the East, the masculine brevity of his best lyrics, and the brilliancy of his satire. For the ephemeral infirmities of modern decadence "the straight- forward virility of Byron's best work may serve as an antidote," while his high lyrical notes may help, as against the "well-knit strenuous verse of extreme realism, to maintain elevation of tone, and to preserve the romantic tradition." Sir Alfred Lyall renders full justice to the ardour, the luxuriant vision, and the marvellous metrical skill of Mr. Swinburne without overlooking the conspicuous defects of his qualities—his intemperate violence, his effusiveness, and his tendency to subordinate thought to melody. In "Frontiers Ancient and Modern," based on Mr. Baddeley's interesting work, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, and Dr. Pennell's book on the wild tribes of the Afghan frontier, we have an admirable sketch of the career of Shamil and a valuable exposition of the principles of frontier policy in India. Of the remaining essays we can only mention two that on Eastern and Western religions, in which Sir Alfred Lyall touches on the political disadvantages of the religious neutrality which he declares to be the " right, just, and only policy which the English in India could possibly adopt"; and a masterly resume and criticism of the contents of the four- teenth volume of the late M. Emile 011ivier's L'Empire Liberal —that which carries the anther's reminiscences from January, 1970, up to the outbreak of the war. He differs from M. 011ivier on many points, notably on Thiers's famous speech on July 15th, but he does no with reluctance and not without good reason. Sir Alfred Lyall's view of the tragedy of the decline and fall of the Second Empire in expressed in two sentences. "It is incontestable that Bismarck had reasons for desiring the war, and that France was inveigled into declaring it." Again: "The national disasters were the outcome of a situation in which weakness and rashness were matched against unscrupulous state- craft and the deep-laid combinations of a consummate strategist."
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