ENGLISH LITERATURE.*
THE second and fourth volumes of Messrs. Garnett and Gosse's illustrated record of English literature do not belie the promise of their predecessors. That is to say, they possess the same lack of method and proportion, together with a similar set of portraits, autographs, and title-pages, which gives to the book whatever value it possesses. But the work was doomed to failure from the beginning. It is not merely that Dr. Garnett and Mr. Gosse do not approach their task from the same point of view ; it is impossible for two critics to cover so wide a field, and retain unto the end a sensitive impression and a sound judgment. Certain errors, however, might have been avoided with a very little care. For instance, there is no reason why we should have two accounts of Knolles's History of the Turks,—one from Dr. Garnett, the other from Mr. Gosse. And had Mr. Gosse consulted his colleague's edition of Coleridge's Poetry, he would not have described the poem which be quotes on p. 57 of the fourth volume as unpublished. But the faults go far deeper than mere inadvertence, and it is difficult to regard the whole work as one and indivisible.
Dr. Garnett is less happy in Vol. II. than in Vol. I. He treads a path which has been too often trod, and it is not surprising that he finds little fresh to say about Shakespeare or Marlowe ; but he could well have spared us many an idle conjecture. He believes, for example, that had Marlowe lived, "he might have addicted himself principally to English historical drama, which Shakespeare, easy tempered as Sophocles, would have conceded to him : we should have unsurmised exercises of Shakespeare's powers in other direc- tions, but we should have lost Falstaff." With all respect to Dr. Garnett, Shakespeare's Falstaff has no more to do with the early death of Marlowe than with the early death of Keats. The British drama of Elizabeth's age was no province to be parcelled out among a band of adventurers, and Shakespeare. we may be sure, would have conceded nothing to Marlowe save genius. There is no possible reason why the two poets should not have both devoted themselves to the historical drama, and criticism such as Dr. Garnett's, for the mere sake of criticism, is of little service to any one. Another in- evita ble blot upon hastily made history such as this is a constant tendency to exaggeration. We yield to none in admiration of Jane Austen, but both Dr. Garnett and Mr. Gosse applaud her in such terms of extravagance as will do her reputation little credit. The one declares that, " apart from Scott and Miss Austen, not a single prose writer deserving to be accounted great appeared in the first quarter of the nineteenth century "—a period which saw the best of Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey—while the other asserts with Macaulay that " the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare." This is merely killing with kindness. Mr. Gosse is particularly unhappy in some of his judgments. " Tuneable " is not the fittest epithet for the songs of Burns, and it is surely straining the truth to say that Walter Pater died " almost obscure." Sometimes Mr. Gosse is almost unintelligible, as when he says of Shelley that " his intellectual ardour threw out, not puffs of smoke, as Byron's did, but a white vapour. He is not always transparent, but always translucent, and his mind moves ethereally among incorporeal images and pantheistic attributes." Nor, if space be a proper measure of importance, are we able to understand his sense of proportion. Why, if Marryat and Lever between them are worth a bare two pages, and J. A. Symonds some twenty lines, should R. L. Stevenson have five pages and a facsimile of a letter all to himself P Of course, it is difficult to measure the conflicting claims of poets, historians, and novelists ; but
• Snglish Literature : an Illustrated Record. By Richard Garnett and Edmund Gone. Vols. U. and IV. London : W. Heinemann. [16s. each vol.]
the problem might have been more accurately solved than it has been by Dr. Garnett and Mr. Gosse.
Mr. Gosse in an epilogue makes a plea for scientific criticism. He believes that the student of literature should borrow help from the methods of Darwin and Mickel, and that he should "apply to poetry and prose the theory which supposes all plant and animal forms to be the result of slow and organic modification." Mr. Gosse, in fact, is as resolute as the newest historians to claim for his craft the name of science. Why he should desire thus to confuse two conflict- ing pursuits we do not know. But apparently he desires to achieve a uniformity of opinion. He objects to what he calls "the individualist method," because "it seduced some of the finest minds of the day into ludicrous and grotesque ex- cesses." He regrets, for example, what he calls the "foolish outburst" of Keats about Boileau. But in diversity consists the true value of criticism. The sincere opinion of one man will always be more interesting than the organised judgment of a mob. The mob, purged of " individualism," may perhaps approach nearer to the plain unvarnished truth. Yet we still prefer Keats's wayward outburst, because, if it misrepresent Boileau, it reveals the profound belief of a great poet. Mr. Gosse, however, would go much further than this. As he would persuade the critic to be, not himself, but a part of a system, so he holds that we see little in the poems of Tennyson •' if we see no more than the lofty idiosyncrasy " of the poet. He prefers to regard him as an ingenious amalgam. " He is a complex instance of natural selection," says Mr. Gosse in an amazing passage, " obvious and almost geometrical, yet interfering not a whit with that counter-principle of individual variation which is needful to make the poet, not a parasite upon his artistic ancestors, but an independent output from the main growing organism." This statement is either untrue or a truism. No doubt Tenny- son would have adopted another style had he lived in another epoch. But, on the other hand, Tennyson is an instance, not of natural selection, but of natural genius, and the chief pleasure which his poems can give us is aesthetic. Science cannot affect our appreciation, and in spite of Mr. Gosse, we do not believe that the use of the scientific jargon now fashionable will ever illumine the dark places of literature. Biography is a useful art, which must needs be controlled by truth. Criticism also is a useful art, but it must reveal to us the opinion of the critic himself, not of an organised and scientific school. At any rate, we shall always prefer the " individualist" opinions of Mr. Swinburne, Pater, or J. A. Symonds, personal and extravagant though they be, to a forced application of a sham Darwinism to the realm of poetry. For the criticism of these artists has a double effect. It shows us not only the beauty of the works on which they express an opinion, but is a revelation also of their own intelligence. Certain pages, for instance, were once written upon Matthew Arnold's Forsaken, Merman which have rightly been described as rivalling the original. No discussion of natural selection can hope to accomplish this, and the true critic's real business is to convey to others the impression which great works have made upon his mind.
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