BOOKS.

MR. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL'S COLLECTED ESSAYS.*

THESE volumes should be read through,—but not all at once. The essays are chiefly literary estimates, or, more correctly speaking, estimates of literary men. Where Mr. Birrell is in real sympathy with his subject, and where he will be serious for ten minutes together, he fulfils his own ideal of a writer's mission. That is, " he possesses the art of destroying for a time his reader's own personality." When he becomes purposely facetious he breaks his own spell, and his reader eomes to himself with a most unpleasant start.

We believe the truth about Mr. Birrell to be this. He is by rights a moralist. No doubt he has a keen sense of humour. The two senses, if not allied, have always been compatible, but he is jostled out of his true vocation by a schoolboy terror of appearing goody. He will begin an essay by telling his readers something that he really thinks, and they find themselves looking up at him with admiration and interest ; all of a sudden be becomes self-conscious, and to quote his own metaphor, "he empties the slops of his mind over his audience without so much as crying Heads below ! ' " To take an instance at random, his really beauti- ful appreciation of the life and poetry of Cowper, filled as it is with sympathy and insight, is disfigured by such a sentence as this :—" His madness ultimately took the turn of believing that it was the will of God that he should kill himself, and that as he had failed to do so he was damned everlastingly. In this faith diversified by doubt, Cowper must be said hence- forth to have lived and died." Again, in discussing the Lady Austin episode, Mr. Birrell says "poor Cowper was no catch." One of the best papers in these volumes is the one on "Truth Hunting," and perhaps this essay is the one in which the two sides of the author's mind contrast least sharply. "What," he asks, "is the effect of the speculative habit upon conduct?" This discussion enables him to use personal illus- tration, and he compares Charles Lamb and Coleridge, drawing the one with true affection, and the other with a not unappre- ciative dislike. How gladly, he declares, would we love the author of Christabel if we could ! But the thing is flatly im- possible. "In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy, where all the virtues were to thrive; Lamb did something far more difficult—be played cribbage every night with his imbecile father." Lamb's friends were philosophers and thinkers. "They discussed their great schemes and affected to probe deep mysteries, and were constantly asking what is truth ? He sipped his glass, shuffled his cards, and contented himself with the humbler inquiry 'what are trumps P ' " "Judged," says Mr. Birrell, "by whatever standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them." "The verdict to be striven for," he adds, "is not well guessed but well done." At this point the nervous reader ducks his head of his own accord, but there is no need. In company with Elia, Mr. Birrell cuts no capers. True, he gets angry once—the only time in two volumes—that is, when he takes his reader for the second time to see his hero, and thinks he overhears him muttering that "after all, poor Lamb drank."

With the essayist's delight in Matthew Arnold's poetry we neartily concur, though we wonder at his using so much of his already circumscribed space in quoting "East London," and "The Better Part." The best sermons, though not the best sonnets in the English language, he thinks them. Again, the moralist ! We cannot, however, help thinking he overrates his prose writings. Did "Literature and Dogma" really restore the Bible to the sceptical laity P Mr. Birrell thinks this was Matthew Arnold's aim, that on the whole he succeeded, and that he induced a large number of persons to take up again, Ind make a daily study of the books of the Old and New Testament. We should have thought the Bible contained sufficient literary attraction to have held such cultured people as English sceptics without needing a poet to bind them to it by criticism, but Mr. Birrell may be right, and if so, Matthew Arnold has laid the sceptical laity under an infinite, and the Hebrew poets under an infinitesimal, obligation. What makes the essayist say that Arnold himself so loved the

°o7ect, EEvya. By Augustine Birrell. 2 voLs. London : Elliot Stock. [125.:

Bible that he could read even Jeremiah ? Do lovers of literature need to read with apology of Rachel weeping for her children? Mr. Birrell surely underrates the eloquence of that strange inverted patriot who, from his dungeon, "so weakened the hands of the men of war," that the generals wanted to put him to death. To do our author justice he gene- rally avoids that cheap originality which consists in reversing the verdict of time upon great men ; indeed, he often exercises himself to good purpose to maintain the orthodox view. We quote what seems to us a particularly well-written paragraph in the essay on Hours in a Library :—

" He (Mr. Leslie Stephen) yields to none in his admiration of good Sir Walter. Yet he writes : It is a question, perhaps, whether the firmer parts of Scott's reputation will be sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish.' Rubbish ! it is a harsh word, and might well make Dean Stanley and a bygone generation of worshippers and believers in the plenary inspiration of Scott stir uneasily in their graves. It grates upon my own ear. But if it is a true word, what then Why even then it does not matter very much, for when time, that old ravager, has done his very worst there will be enough left of Sir Walter to carry down his name and fame to the remotest age. He cannot be ejected from his native land, Loch Katrine and Loch Leven are not exposed to criticism, and they will pull Sir Walter through."

In the essay entitled "Actors," Mr. Birrell pours acorn on what seems to him a frivolous and ephemeral art. "Chippen- dale, the cabinet-maker," he declares, "is more potent than Garrick the actor. The vivacity of the latter no longer charms (save in Boswell). The chairs of the former still render rest impossible in a hundred homes." The essay on Dr. Johnson is charming. Mr. Birrell loves his "massive shade' and manages to call it up so as to delight his readers, at the same time contriving a clever comparison between Carlyle and Johnson, Boswell and Fronde. As to Gibbon Mr. Birrell shares the want of appreciation for the historian expressed by the lexicographer. He thinks him at best a great narrator and not a thinker at all, and repeats with rather petty pleasure Johnson's remarks on his personal appear- ance. Over a smaller man, George Borrow, Mr. Birrell becomes unaccountably enthusiastic. He is evidently under a spell which he fails to throw over his reader, who "stands outside with a bucket of cold water," to quote Mr. Birrell himself. Long pieces are quoted from Borrow's various books, and Louis Stevenson is snubbed for saying he had rather a fancy for Borrow, and told that his opinion makes no odds to such a reputation ; for all this the passages trans- cribed are dull in the extreme.

In divines and their writings there is no doubt that Mr.

Birrell has an exceptionally keen interest. His criticism of their work is as sympathetic as it is detached. Of Law, the author of The Serious Call, he says :—

" Splendid achievement though 'The History of the Decline and Fall' may be, glorious monument though it is, more lasting than brass, of learning and industry, yet in sundry moods it seems but a poor and barren thing by the side of a book which, like Law's Serious Call,' has proved its power to pierce the heart and tame the will.' " We must admit, however, that this tribute is somewhat spoiled by the characteristic juxtaposition of the following paragraph:— "But I must curb my enthusiasm or I shall find myself re- echoing the sentiment of a once celebrated divine who brought down Exeter Hall by proclaiming at the top of his voice that he would sooner be the author of The Washerwoman on Salisbury Plain' than of Paradise Lost.'" No less deep is his interest in Cardinal Newman,—in

his prose and in his poetry. No Catholic could admire him more fervently, yet he is ever conscious of that vast darkness which Newman's lucidity enables his readers to appreciate so terribly well. Of Newman's poetry he says :—" It is fitting that our last quotation should be one which leaves Cardinal Newman face to face with his faith. Dr. Newman's poetry cannot be passed over without a word, though I am ill-fitted to do it justice.

'Lead Kindly Light' has forced its way into every hymn- book and every heart. Those who go and those who do not go to church, the fervent believer and the tired-out sceptic, meet here on common ground. The language of the verses in their intense sincerity seems to reduce all human feelings, whether fed on dogmas and holy rites or on man's sad heart, to a common denomination :-

'The The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead thou me on.' The believer can say no more, the unbeliever will never willingly say less."

Mr. Birrell's writing is of the nature of brilliant talk rather than literature; as such it suffers from the defects of mono- logue and often fails to gain the sympathy of the reader who has a sense that he is being left out.