THE LITERATURE OF THE CENTURY.*

WE venture to assert, and we say it with a tolerably fall knowledge of what Mr. Saintsbury has accomplished as a literary critic, that this " History," which must have been the weightiest of his labours, is on the whole the most successful. The difficulties of the task are obvious. In writing A History of Elizabethan Literature, the critic had the judgment of three centuries to fall back upon. He might not agree with what was "in the books," but he knew what was in them, and time, the great arbiter of literary fame, had settled many once dubious questions. For the most part the position of the great Elizabethans is fixed. They enjoy a literary freehold from which no change of taste can move them, and all that a critic can do is to point out the measure of their claims, and their relation to the men who have pre- ceded or followed them.

With the period now reviewed by the historian, a portion has in some degree a similar advantage of age, but there is much on which any judgment demands the highest critical sagacity, and much upon which no final decision can be safely passed. We are all of us generally under the influence of what is nearest to us, and the most impartial of critics is liable to be swayed in his estimate of the authors who have appeared in his own day, and have therefore affected him the most keenly. Moreover, the extent of the ground to be covered by the historian of literature in our own century is obviously wider than in that of Shakespeare and Milton, and the toil is therefore greater. The number of books that have a claim to be read is enormous, and that Mr. Saintsbury is thoroughly acquainted with most of the works he writes about, and is fairly conversant with all, will, we think, be evident to the student of the period. The History fills less than five hundred pages ; much conciseness is therefore indis- pensable, and if the reader regrets that a, cherished author is dismissed too hastily or omitted altogether, he may be reminded that " very favourite books and authors of his own " have been similarly treated by the critic.

In a literary history poetry takes the precedence, and what an age is that which includes the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Shelley and Keats, of Scott and Byron, in its earlier period, while as the century advanced, a fresh season of glorious poetry was ushered in by Tennyson and the Brownings, and by Matthew Arnold. These are the pre- eminent poets of the century, but in addition there is a nest of singing birds whose musical notes would have made the poetical fortune of the age of Pope. A glance at Mr. Saintsbury's copious index reminds us how numerous and how worthy these are, so worthy, indeed, that we are disposed to hesitate in classing some of them with the "minor poets" who receive brief, but not unappreciative, notice in these pages. Mr. Saintsbury does well to commence his survey in 1780, since between that date and 1800 not only were the seeds sown, but some of the golden grain reaped which

' A History of Nineteenth. Century Literature, 1780-1396. By George Baintsr bury. London : Macmillan and Co.

heralded a succession of fruitful harvests. Cowper was then in his prime, so were Burns and Blake ; and Crabbe had sounded a fresh note in "The Library," " The Village," and "The Newspaper." The revolution had begun, and before the knell of the last century had sounded the greatest poet of the present exhibited his distinctive genius; so too did Coleridge, who for subtlety of charm and perfection of music is perhaps without a rival. The Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, contained "The Ancient Mariner," which, as Mrs. Barbauld sapiently remarked, was " improbable," and that volume, with the second series of Lyrical Ballads published two years later, contains many of the loveliest and most original poems ever written by Wordsworth. When we remember too, as Mr. Pater has pointed out, that nearly all Coleridge's chief works as a poet were composed in 1798, it will be seen with what good reason the final years of that century belong to the poetical history of our own.

Mr. Saintsbury's attractive volume is full of suggestions that call for comment did space permit, but we must be con- tent to pass rapidly over the ground. We think, though Mr Swinburne prefers the "Ode to Duty," that the critic is almost justified in calling the great " Ode on Immortality " the "one supremely great thing Wordsworth ever did poetry than which there is none better in any language, poetry such as there is not perhaps a small volume full in all lan- guages;" and he says this while doing full justice to the many instances in which, as we read this wonderful poet, "the poetic flash dazzles our eyes, and the whole divine despair, or not more divine rapture, which poetry causes, comes upon us." Passing from the summit of the poetical mountain to a lower eminence, how just is this estimate of Southey :-

" He is the possessor of perhaps the purest and most perfect English prose style, of a kind at once simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has written (in the Life of Nelson) perhaps the best short biography in that language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman has ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent comprehension and memory of what he read. Unlike many bookworms, he had an exceedingly lively and active humour. He has scarcely an equal, and certainly no superior, in the rare and difficult art of discern- ing and ranging the material parts of an historical account ; the pedant may glean, but the true historian will rarely reap, after him. And in poetry his gifts, if they are never of the very highest, are so numerous and often so high that it is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet."

Southey, the critic adds, could not be idle, and "idleness of some sort is absolutely necessary to the poet who is to be supreme." If by idleness Mr. Saintsbury means leisure, we agree with him; and when Wordsworth was " booing about" in his mountain walks, he was engaged in the most strenuous mental occupation. "My master's study," as his maid- servant said, "is out of doors." It is difficult to understand the author's reason for thinking that if Shelley had lived he would have gone on writing better, while there is less pro- bability of a similar progress in the case of Keats. The reverse opinion would, we think, be the more correct. In lyrical art Shelley could scarcely have surpassed the consum- mate work he achieved ; but in the case of Keats, all that he has done of enduring work was written in the last two years of his life. It was the third volume of verse published in 1820 which ranks him with the greatest of English poets, and he died in 1821.

Eminently just and appreciative is Mr. Saintabury's estimate of Scott, who can " on no sound theory of poetical criticism be ranked as a poet below Byron, who was hie imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric," Scott's mere snatches having " a beauty not inferior to that of the best things of his greatest contemporaries." As a romance writer Sir Walter's most ardent admirers will be satisfied with the generous estimate recorded. After styling him the father of nineteenth-century romance, as Jane Austen is the mother of the nineteenth-century novel, he observes that " no one except Shakespeare has ever possessed in larger measure—though others have possessed it in greater partial intensity and per- fection—the gift of communicating life to the persons, the story, the dialogue ; " and that " in everything but pure style and the expression of the highest raptures of love, thought, and nature, he ranks with the greatest writers of the world."

Of Scott's contemporaries and successors in the art of fiction the historian writes generally, though, we think, not always with discrimination, and sometimes, as in the case of Jane Austen and of Thackeray, with enthusiasm, which, however, is greatly moderated when be oomes to estimate the claims of Dickens, of the Brontes, and of George Eliot. Dickens, by-the-way, wrote a Child's History of England, which, says Mr. Saintsbury, " is probably the worst book ever written by a man of genius, except Shelley's novels, and has not, like them, the excuse of extreme youth." Dickens, it is probable, was induced to follow in the steps of Scott, and to win a similar reward; but Sir Walter, who succeeded in whatever he undertook that was not perfunctory, has achieved in the Tales of a Grandfather one of his most charming and charac- teristic works. We do not agree with the author that Emily Bronte has been extravagantly praised, and we cannot agree with him that her sister's Villette "is little more than an embroidered version of the Brussels' sojourn," and that it was Charlotte's good fortune to die before she had exhausted her vein. No doubt her range was limited, but we can see no sign of such exhaustion in Villette. Call it an "embroidered version " if you will, but to produce such embroidery from materials so homely is a gift of the rarest order. Mr.

Saintsbury is justified in calling George Eliot's verse wooden, occasionally grandiose, but never grand, and in saying that the style of her latest books was obscured by "a most portentous jargon." We think, too, that, like Thackeray, she destroyed much of the illusion and the charm of fiction by criticising her own characters ; but when the author observes that the charm of her novels is due to

observation not invention, that Ronio/a is a dead book, "a work of erudition not of genius," and that even her earlier

books are to some extent " lifeless structures," we can but express our amazement at so shallow a judgment.

We must pass on, for our space is nearly exhausted. We cannot attempt to notice the fine criticisms upon Tennyson, or on Mr. Ruskin, the only living author noticed, on Keble, on Cardinal Newman, or on Matthew Arnold as a poet ; but how pertinent is this judgment of the last-mentioned writer when, in what may be called he theological works, be ventures out of his depth :-

" Apart from the popular audacity of their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters confidently attack- ing thorny questions without any apparatus of special knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy of their author. There are many brilliant passages in these books, as writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic ; but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they undergo the very curse of speaking without qualifica- tion and without true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself EO freely denounced."

With regard to Huxley the author considers there is some truth as well as some paradox in the remark that " a literary critic of the very first class was lost in him, at the salvage only of some scientific monographs which, like all their kind, will be antiquated some day, and of some polemics which must suffer equally from the touch of time."

Mr. Saintabury's generous criticism and the extent of his knowledge will be seen in the notices of minor poets and prose-men whose feeble vitality appears to be on the verge of extinction, but of course he gives his best thought and most careful consideration to the men who have won a high place in literature. Of essayists like Lamb and Hazlitt and De Quincey, his judgment is probably that of most intelligent critics ; in the main, too, the same statement holds good as to the historians of the period, but to some readers it may be new and strange to see Thirlwall restored to the position from which he has for a season been ousted by Grote. The praise awarded to Macaulay will not satisfy his admirers ; and there is truth, perhaps, in the statement that Freeman's style is "disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock phrases." There is partial truth, too, in the view of Fronde as "one of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect [only one'.] and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century."

Mr. Saintsbury'a own style is by no means, as we have before said in the Spectator, one of his prominent merits ;

but if his language does not especially allure the reader, his matter does, and it would have been difficult to make any historical survey of a literary period more interesting and suggestive.