BOOKS.

MRS. OLIPHANT'S LITERARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1790-1825.* THIS is a very difficult book to estimate. At once brilliant and uncertain, now containing as bright and true a criticism as combined genius and sympathy could produce, now dashing off a paradoxical condemnation which seems to come in part of haste and carelessness, and in part of self-will, Mrs. Oliphant's three volumes contain much more that is fine and true than any book of the kind that is so little trustworthy, and much more that is arbitrary and capricious, than any book so full of admirable passages. If Mrs. Oliphant had limited herself to essays on her own favourite authors of this period, we should have liked her book much better, though even then we should, we suppose, have been compelled to read the strangely inadequate. estimate of Wordsworth, who is more praised for his weaker work and less for his greatest work than we should have thought it possible for a warm admirer of Wordsworth to achieve. She is, by the way, often inaccurate about Wordsworth, a sure sign of not really liking him as well as she herself fancies. She quotes, for instance, with just condemnation, an expression which she herself has made worse than it actually is in the process of passing it through her own memory, namely, "the very pulse of the machine," which Mrs. Oliphant renders, "the very heart of the machine." Either expression is prosaic enough, but the latter is much the worse. A steam-engine, with its throb, might, perhaps, be conceived as pulsating, but the " heart " of a machine is a monstrous conception. We have, however, already said enough some time ago of Mrs. Oliphant's criticism of Words- worth. In the present notice, we shall restrict ourselves to some criticism of Mrs. Oliphant's rather irregular distribution of praise and censure to the other greater and lesser figures of the era she has chosen.

The essay on Cowper is among the most brilliant and satis- factory of all Mrs. Oliphant's estimates. It seems to us, as a literary estimate, quite perfect,—as a personal estimate, somewhat less so, for in the ridicule which she gently pours over Cowper's self-indulgent indolence and unwillingness to take upon himself family cares, she forgets, we think, that the taint of insanity in him ought to have had, and probably had, very much to do with this reluctance ; since it would have been culpable in him, as well as in all probability in opposition to some warning instinct in him, to have formed ties which must have risked the trans- mission of his diseased organisation to posterity. The following admirable passage, in which Mrs. Oliphant exhibits the full skill of her trained insight into character, does, however, show that her little attacks on Cowper's indolence and self-indulgence are more of the nature of compensation to herself for lavishing so. much praise on so self-cherishing an invalid, than of serious.

criticism :—

"Cowper recovered from this second attack as a child might have recovered from a severe illness, with no rapture of light and joy such as attended his former recovery, but a gentle and languid return to. the possibility of existence. Ho came slowly to life out of doors. The spiritual and intellectual man which had been strained to death dropped from him, and a harmless, gentle creature, with the tastes of a child, came out into the silent sunshine instead. He pruned the trees, he fed the fowls, smiling, 'for the first time for sixteen months,' at some touch of nature among them. When he at last consented to go home, the flickering life grew a little stronger; he became a carpenter, made bird-cages and tables, and built himself a green- * The Literary History of England, 'in the End of the Eighteenth Century and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. By Mrs. Oliphant. London: Macmillan and Co. 3 vols. house, like a boy come home for the holidays. As long as he is occupied,' says Newton, he is tolerably easy.' As the process advanced he tried a little drawing, and, when he began to approach complete amendment, books. But he was not ful:y restored (if, indeed, he can ever have been said to be fully restored) until his spiritual director was removed from Olney. It seems almost cruel to the real friendship and affection subsisting between them, to note the new spring which came to Cowper as soon as he was left to himself. Probably he was quite unconscious of it, and the friendship remained as warm as ever ; but the fact is certain that Newton was no sooner out of the way than the first break appeared in the sky of the poet. Newton left Olney in the end of 1779, and in May, 1780, Cowper sent to his friend Hill, with whom he had resumed correspondence, a copy of the pleasant verses entitled Report of an Adjudged Case not to be found in any of the Books;' the case of Nose verse Eyes.' The coincidence is singular, if it is no more ; and it is singular, too, to note the innocent unconscious hypocrisy with which he keeps up to Newton the semblance of entire darkness after the invasion of this spark of light. The interposition of a sportive thought' is, he says, 'as if harlequin should intrude himself into the ghastly chamber where a corpse is deposited in state '—a saying which his biographers in general take for a proof of the continuance of his darker mood, but which looks much more like that maintenance of the habitual gloom expected from a sufferer, which is one of the commonest and most excusable traits of humanity. You think I am merry, and have got over it,' we all say when we are surprised by our first laugh ; but if you only knew how my outward appearance mocks the woe within.' Thus Cowper kept on his sables, his melancholy counten- ance, knowing that these gloome would gain him a certain credit in his friends' eyes which a laugh would dissipate; but, all the same, felt the warm tide of renewed life stealing into his heart. And now there dawned upon him brighter days—the brightest days in his life. He begins not only to write to his friends, but to send verses to them ; -now sportive, now moralising, but all disclosing a new tide in his mind. His letters to Newton still display, with a certain half-sad, half-amusing, persistency, the black mask of woe unutterable in which that friend had been accustomed to see him ; but he puts it on to no other of his correspondents. Thus, while he writes to Unwin of his favourite pursuits, it is in choorfulest tones, I never received a little pleasure in my life ; if I am delighted, it is in the extreme;' but he recurs to the fictitious solemnity habitual to their intercourse when he tells Newton of the very same pleasures, assuring him that when he has paid his greenhouse, his latest toy, 'the accustomed visit, and watered it and given it air, I say to myself,—" This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present ; I most leave it soon."' The solemnity here is almost ludicrous ; he could not have spoken more seriously had the plaything lent him' been a favourite child. But it becomes amusing to note this entire change of tone according to the correspondent. It is as if Newton and Cowper were compelled to use a different language from that of ordinary MOD, and kept up their proficiency in it, us they might have done with a foreign tongue, by practising it between themselves. But in the meantime, his bondage to unnatural duties was over, and all about him learned to humour and soothe, no longer to make claims upon, ,the gentle invalid, How to keep him amused and quietly employed was now the chief problem, not how to make use of him, and turn his gifts and graces to account. This, then, was the training which made a poet of Cowper, one of the most popular in England—in his way a, transforming influence, a new beginning of intellectual life and power. Had we been left to conjecture what lines of education would have been the best on which to raise up for us the precursor of a new poetical age, certainly these are not the lines which we would have chosen. Nor, had we been asked to prophesy what were the works to be expected from a man so exceptionally circumstanced— with a past so strangely chequered, a future so painfully uncertain, a mind so sensitive, and which had passed through so many passionate struggles—could we have hit upon anything half so unlikely as the actual issue. What we should have looked for would have been some profound and morbid study of a despairing soul, some terrible pictures like those of Job, some confusion of gloomy skies and storms, and convulsions of nature. That anatomy of the heart which he gives us in his various narratives of his own feelings, that minute dissection • of quivering nerve and tissue, would have been what we should have looked for in his poetry. But lo, when the moment came, and the prophet was softly persuaded and guided into the delivery of his burden, it was DO such wild exposition of the terrors and pangs of the soul that came to his lips. These .heavy vapours melted and dispersed from the infinite sweet 'blueness of the heavens : he forgot himself as if he had never been—and forgot all those miseries of the imagination, those bitter pangs and sorrows, the despair and darkness through which he had

• stumbled blindly for years. A soft and genial freedom entered into his soul, involuntary smiles came to him, light to his eyes, and to his steps each wandering careless grace, such devious gentle ways, as no

• one had dreamed of. The country through which the lazy Ouse meandered was new-discovered by the new poet. It was a torpid, flat, damp midland district ; and he a convulsed and sorrow.stricken soul. But ere any one knew the dull fields turned into a fresh and fragrant landscape, a homely sweet epitome of nature and the man into a new see-er according to the ancient meaning nature, the word, a spectator full of that happy wonder and surprise as at a new sight never revealed to man before, which is the privilege of genius. Some- thing miraculous is in every such revelation. In Cowper it was

• doubly ; for this new country which he discovered, like Columbus, was old and familiar, and himself long past all the novelties of life."

It would be hard to find a more effective, and brilliant, and faithful description of any poet and man to whom English literature has been indebted for a great and critical revolution. Even, however, in the criticism of Cowper, we cannot always .agree with Mrs. Oliphant. She appears to place, for instance,

the lines to his mother's picture and the lines to "My Mary" far above "The Castaway ;" but it seems to us that no "profound and morbid study of a despairing soul" ever was more vivid than that which ends in the magnificent lines which she herself quotes ;— "No voice divine the storm allayed, No light propitious shone, When, snatched from all effectual aid, We perished, each alone; But I, beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he."

That was Cowper's epitaph on himself, and a more memorable one was never written.

Mrs. Oliphant is always strong when she is on Scotch ground (though she overpraises Wilson, and some others of that group), but often much less so on Irish and English ground,—which

makes us admire all the more her brilliant chapters on Cowper. Nothing can be more wilfully inadequate than her notice of Moore, whose greatest strength of all, his extraordinary wit and satirical brilliancy, actually receives no shadow of notice ; while even his

lyrical power is greatly under-rated, and represented by one of the feeblest specimens of his melodies, and one so incorrectly printed as to injure both the rhythm and the effect of the first verse. But even in her criticism of the figures of the greater English poets, Byron and Shelley, Mrs. Oliphant seems to us often capricious. Thus she lays little stress on the supreme wit of Byron, whose Vision of ,Tictigment, as well as much of

his Don ,Tican, seems to us to show Byron at the very height of his power. She, however, regards Clkilde Harold as the greatest

effort of his genius. In this estimate, and. that of Byron's letters, which Mrs. Oliphant treats as on the whole poor affairs, we find ourselves entirely unable to agree. Detestable as much of the spirit of Don Yuan is, it seems to us much the greatest product of his genius ; while his letters, wanting, as they are, in intellectual interest, always have the strange fascination which a scornful and witty man of genius Can always manage to give to his familiar letters, if he will. Byron's were, no doubt, intended to mislead people concerning himself, quite as much as to enlighten them, but they do not interest us the less for that. They have in them the indelible mark of his personality, and whether they contain a scoff or a melodramatic sigh, a gibe at himself or rage at his friends, the confession of his half-real and half-affected parsimony, evi- dences of the conflict between his imagination, which was strong, and his judgment, which was conventional, or of the strange blending of impulsive generosity with profound selfishness, signs of the insolence he fostered in himself, shot, nevertheless, with gleams of candour, or of his passionate delight in all sorts of excitement, his Journals and Letters appear to us some of the most fascinating, as well as some of the least edifying of all human compositions. The grand "pageant," as Mr. Arnold has so finely called it, of Byron's "bleeding heart," would never have been complete without the Don Juan and the letters. In Childe Han.old, Byron wraps him- self in a grand incognito, and is never even as near his true

self as he is in the more familiar and more cynical productions. It is perfectly true that a great deal of the cynicism is acted, but it is also perfectly true that the acting of cynicism came much nearer to a revelation of the true man than the acting of more sublime sorrow. Byron—except, indeed, in such lyrics as

the Isles of Greece, in which there is a breath of patriotic fervour that was quite genuine—was at his best when delineat-

ing either the passion of others, especially women, or the profound desire which filled himself to be thought to look down

in scorn on all mankind, and if possible to persuade himself that he really did so. Mrs. Oliphant gives us a fine passage on the comparison between Scott and Byron, in the delineation of women :—

" There is a comparison made by Byron himself of a passage of his ParisMa,' with a passage in Marmion,' which makes this wonder- fully clear. I fear there is a resemblance,' he says, though I never thought of it before, and could hardly wish to imitate that which is inimitable.' The passages in question are descriptions of the guilty heroines of the two tales—Parisina and Constance—at the crisis of their fate. We give that of Marmion ' first ;— 'Her look composed, and steady eye, Bespoke a matchless constantly; And there she stood, BO calm and pale, That, but her breathing did not fail, And motion slight of eye and head, And of her bosom, warranted That neither sense nor pulse she lacks, Yon might have thought a form of wax Wrought to the very life was there ; $o still she was, so pale, so fair.'

This is Constance on her trial—the betrayed and betraying maiden-

victim and instrument of wiekedness—on the verge of a doom which destroys her alone. The other is Parisina, more, yet less, sinful— contemplating, not her own, but her lover's fate :—

'She stood, I said, all pale and still, The living cause of Rugo's ill ; Iler eyes unmoved, bin full and wide, Not onoo had turd to either side— Nor once did these sweet eyelids close, Or shade the glance o'er which they rose, But round their orbs of deepest blue The circling white d lated grew- Aud there with glossy gaze she stood, As ioe were in her curdled blood.'

Nothing could better show the range of the two poets. Bootee picture is pathetic, and moves the reader with a sentiment of tenderness and pity, such as the sufferings of innocence, rather than guilt, should call forth. Constance appears to us as a victim—almost a martyr ; but in Byron's companion sketch, the half-stupefied yet all.conscious still- ness of doom, the awe, the anguish, the horror, affect us with some- thing of the same overwhelming cessation of thought and sense as has befallen the miserable, beautiful creature, standing dumb, in agony ineffable, to see destruction overtake the sharer of her sin. The very background glows with a pale flame of passion behind her head, and those wide-opened, motionless eyes. Constance breathes and moves, .but Parisina's whole being is arrested like a frozen stream."

That is all true, but it hardly does justice to Scott's imaginative power, which, though little shown in his poetical delineations of passion, sometimes reaches a point even as high as Byron's in his prose, though Mrs. Oliphant, we fear, would hardly admit this. At

least she speaks of Madge 'Wildfire as melodramatic, whereas we hold Madge Wildfire to be one of the finest pictures in all Eng- lish literature. Nor do we think remorse was ever more finely painted by human hand than in the great scene in the Abbot, where Mary Fleming unthinkingly recalls to her Queen's mind the horrors of Holyrood. Mrs. Oliphant does more justice to the higher reaches of Shelley's imagination in her criticism of the Cenci, than she ever does to the higher reaches of Byron's. And on the whole, though, she seems to us greatly to exaggerate the indistinctness of Shelley's drift, we are satisfied that she does more justice to Shelley than she does to Byron, whose conven- tionality of judgment often repels her, while his extraordinary wit never seems to take hold of her.

Of the minor sketches, the least just, or perhaps we ought to say the most unjust, is that of Hazlitt, to whom Mrs. Oli- phant gives but seven pages, while to the tedious and pedantic Godwin and his surroundings she gives nearly sixty. We confess that we cannot understand this in a writer of Mrs. Oliphant's keenness and brilliancy. What she says of Hazlitt's obsolete- ness, too, is, so far as we can judge, simply erroneous :— "It has never been proved, nor can it be proved, according to our belief, that to write for bread is bad for real genius, especially of the creative kind : but to write for bread when you have no message to deliver, no definite burden of prophecy, no story to tell, is a different matter. It is in these circumstances that literature is a dangerous Profession. In most cases the professional writer has some gift besides, which buoys him up above the common merchandise of buying and selling. But Ilaxlitt had no philosophy and no story ; be was an essayist, a critic, a commentator upon other men's works and Ways, rather than an original performer. There is nothing in litera- ture so difficult as this branch of the profession, which tempts the unwary with its seeming ease. Bow far it benefits genius, to be trained and polished by all the appliances of learning, is still a moot point ; but there can bo no question that culture is the first essential to the literary man who does not possess genius, but only a talent for expressing himself, and the power of seeing intellectual subjects from a critical point of view. In this case the proverb does not tell, which declares that a poet must bo born and not made—for he is not a poet, and his chances of commanding anything more than a present audi- ence depend upon his thorough cultivation and knowledge. Ilazlitt did not possess these qualities, and his books are already as old as if

they had been written a thousand years ago, instead of half a hundred"

We should say that Hazlitt is still widely read, aud that there is little better reading. Charming as Lamb is, there is far less to be learned from him of the life of his day than there is from the gloomy and dyspeptic Hazlitt. Violent and unjust as were his prejudices, he had one of the shrewdest oyes of his generation, and his papers on "My First Acquaintance with Poets," for instance, give us more knowledge of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley,—the latter especially,—than we can get from any other source. As a critic, too, he cannot help discerning genius where genius is, and brings home to us with marvellous force exactly in what it consisted. In fact, we know no essays of the early part of the present century to compare with. Tiazlitt's for shrewdness, force, and a certain accurate, if decidedly malevolent incisiveness. Among the caprices of Mrs. Oliphant's judgment, we find. none odder than her notion of the obsoleteness of Hazlitt, unless it be the notion that Goethe's Goetz. von Bertiehingen is a poor affair. As a matter of fact, there have been a vast number of different editions of different

volumes of Hazlitt's essays, and we should call him by far the most modern of that group of writers to which he belonged. It will be seen that we find Mrs. Oliphant's book one of very irregular ability. Some parts of it are as good, and some as inadequate, as it is possible for criticisms to be; but the style of the whole is delightful, and it is certainly the most interesting literary production of the present year. If Mrs. Oliphant had attempted less,—if she had made her book not a history, but a criticism of selected authors, and had wasted less of her power on authors hi whom she felt a very slender interest, she would, we think, have produced a book as uniformly delightful as she has certainly produced one that is uniformly interesting and lively.