BOOKS.

IT is impossible not to compare these lectures with those of Professor Shairp's predecessor,—the greatest English critic of his age,—Mr. Matthew Arnold. In many respects, they suffer, but in a few they certainly gain, by the com- parison. Mr. Arnold is an artist, as well as a critic. He pub- lished his Oxford lectures at rather rare intervals, and he polished highly what he published. He took care that no lecture should be published without bearing the mark of some very definite and usually piquant idea, which was exuberantly illustrated, and pressed home with a curious mixture of humour and delicacy. Mr. Shairp • Aspects of Poetry, being Lectures delivered at Orford. By dohs Campbell Bliairp, LL.D. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

makes no effort of this kind. His essays make no pre- tensions to be elaborate works of art in themselves. They are the simple overflowings of a full and a refined mind, saturated with poetical feeling and lucid thought on the various topics which such a Professorship as his suggests. What he has to say he says in pure and delightful English, and often with very great point and effect, though without the almost sculpturesque unity of impression which Mr. Arnold's lec- tures on translating Homer, on Heine, and on the Celtic genius produced upon their readers. Mr. Shairp talks to us as an accomplished man, with a great store of central heat in him, and a passionate love for poetry, would talk of the vari- ous aspects of his favourite study. Mr. Arnold made his lectures works of art, and as works of art they retain their hold. on the memory rather for the fine chiselling of the ideas they contain, than for the adequacy of their treatment of the subjects with which they are connected. Hence, Mr. Shairp's lectures gain as well as lose in the comparison. They are more natural as lectures, and seem to contain more of that which we expect of them than Mr. Arnold's, though they are not individually as rememberable. They do more, we think, to enhance the charm of the poets with whom they deal than Mr. Arnold's essays did. They do less to signalise particular aspects of those poets, and to present them in un- expected lights. They are less artistic, less finished, more human, and, on the whole, we think, more eloquent. Many of Mr. Shairp's lectures go straight to the heart. And when you look at the range of his poetic enthusiasm, which is as keen for Burns as it is for Cardinal Newman, for Sir Walter Scott as for Virgil, one can see at once that in this delightful volume there is no stint of eager thought and fresh enthusiasm. Wordsworth, no doubt, is Mr. Shairp's poet of poets ; and few understand.

Wordsworth as he understands him. But it is impossible to rise from this volume without feeling the charm of the external poetry of Scott with a new vividness, as well as without enter- ing into the spell of the interior poetry of Wordsworth with a new intelligence.

It might appear that Mr. Shairp is not at all inclined to limit the sphere of poetry too much, when he says in his first lecture on its true province :—" I should rather say that the whole range of existence, or any part of it, when imaginatively apprehended, seized on the side of its human interest, may be transfigured. into poetry. There is nothing that exists, except things ignoble and mean, in which the true poet may not find himself at home." But is there not here a qualification which Mr. Shairp himself would on consideration hardly retain ? Has not a great deal of true poetry been spent on things "ignoble and mean," where the poetry has consisted in the flash of light by which the ignobility and meanness have been brought out ? What is, in its fashion, truer poetry than Shakespeare's picture of Caliban, —a conception of the essentially mean and ignoble, if ever there were one ? Nay, more, the mere pallor of life,—the empti- ness of our life of its proper interests,—may be a fit enough subject for poetry, if it is described by one who has in him a passionate feeling of what the significance of life ought really to be. What can be truer poetry than Henry Vaughan's lament over the nothingness of his own life ?—

" I see them walking in an air of glory

Whose light doth trample on my days ; My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, Mere glimmering and decays 1"

This picture of the nothingness of life as he lives it, compared with what he conceives the true life to be, is marvellous in its beauty, and yet no one can say that it is not the very painting of that nothingness, as conceived by one whose higher nature suggested what the true life should be, that forms the very charm of the verse. But though we take exception to Mr. Shairp's language here, we are quite sure that we do but interpret the real mean- ing of his thought, and that he would not only admit, but maintain, that the vision of things mean and ignoble, if so pre- sented as to make you see more clearly their intrinsic meanness and ignobility, or the vision of feelings dim and faint, if so presented. as to make you feel keenly their dimness and faint- ness against a background of light and warmth, is within the true province of poetry, and is, indeed, often essential to the better realisation of the light and life behind. Indeed, Professor Shairp does indicate this, in the course of the same lecture ; for he tells ns, in a passage as terse as it is true, that the truest art is achieved in forgetfulness of art, by aiming at something altogether above art :-

"Poets who do not recognise the highest moral ideal known to man,

do, by that very act, cut themselves off from the highest artistic effect. It is another exemplification of that great law of ethics which compasses all human action, whereby the abandonment of a lower end in obedience to a higher aim is made the very condition of securing the lower one.' For just as the pleasure-seeker is not the- pleasure-finder, so he who aims only at artistic effect, by that very act misses it. To reach the highest art, we must forget art, and aim beyond it. Other gifts being equal, the poet, who has been enabled to apprehend the highest moral conception, has in that gained for- himself a great poetic vantage-ground."

And unquestionably one of the most effective ways in which the highest moral conceptions are impressed upon us, is by the- delineation of something altogether mean and ignoble, as seen by the light of those conceptions. It is by virtue Of a philippic against that in themselves which they despise, that many a poet has sounded the highest note which it was evergiven him to reach..

There is a sonnet of Hartley Coleridge's which has been called "The Unpardonable Sin," and the beauty of which consists in

the vividness with which the unfulfilled desire to do something evil,—something worse than the will has been by fate permitted to do,—is painted, and in the abhorrence which that state of mind (evidently familiar to the poet, as things which one abhors are too often familiar), excites in one who knew it well. There we have a perfect instance of a poet's finding himself at home in some- thing ignoble, and yet gleaning from that very familiarity with it, as seen against the sky-line of his higher nature, the subject for an exquisite poem.

But we could go farther than this, and maintain that what is ignoble and mean may be made the subject of what is genuine though repulsive poetry, even when there is no sky-line of higher faith and feeling exhibited. behind it. Professor Shairp himself admits that Byron never reached his highest point as

a poet, until his genius mirrored itself fully in Don Juan ; and who can say that the marvellous power of Don Juan is not exhibited in the free and potent strokes with which what is evil,

ignoble, and mean is drawn, even when nothing, by way of com- ment, appears in connection with it, except, perhaps, the scoffing laughter of the poet? And so, too, in Burns's " Jolly Beggars," it seems to us that Burns touched nearly the highest point of his creative genius, though nothing, except the large licence of the roving vagabond's life, is concentrated into it, and rendered with an almost passionate wealth of vigour and sympathy. It cannot be doubted, we think, that the picture of what is ignoble.

and mean,—even when painted with the lavishness of positive sympathy, as it is in the cases we have just mentioned,—may be made the subject of a true poem ; but then, when this is the case, there must be implicitly contained some hint, such as the cynical laughter of Byron affords, or such as the licentious

abandon of Shakespeare's scenes of dissipation, and the vagabond rollick of Burns's beggars, give us, that here you see man as he is when he deliberately throws off the yoke of the moral law, and dashes into the wilder- ness of mere licentious pleasure. Poetry, when it paints

subjects of this kind, is undoubtedly not doing its highest work. But it is doing a poetical work all the same, if it is only sufficiently true to nature to make you see clearly that here men's passions have got the bit between their teeth, and are rushing away into the world. of " sand and thorns." And this all true poets, even when they spend their poetic power on evil subjects, do make you feel with great intensity. We must return again next week to this charming book, to make some comment on Professor Shairp's more special criticisms of poets, in verse and prose.