CANON AINGER'S LECTURES AND ESSAYS.* THE author of these volumes

ranges over a wide field, from Chaucer to Tennyson, giving five lectures and two essays to Shakespeare, and writing also of Swift, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Dickens, of children's books, of actors, modern plays, conversation, of wit, and of euphuism. He is not one of the giants of criticism ; there is nothing mighty in his book ; nor is it sparkling and astonishing ; but it is extremely interesting and true. A first reading wins the verdict, "This is good criticism" ; a third or fourth produces the conviction, "And much of it is of the best criticism." It is, indeed, no small merit in a writer when he expresses his most subtle thought with the lucidity, ease, and completeness that are to be found here. There are a few who speak so simply, so urbanely, that the reader hardly realises

how much they are telling him; but phrases linger in his memory, thoughts fructify in his mind, and gradually he recognises the quiet source from whence they proceeded. To these we often return, taking ever deeper pleasure in them, and (if a strong expression may be employed in its full signifi- cance) loving them.

Canon Ainger's first three lectures on Shakespeare illustrate this. He lays down at the beginning certain limitations

within which these lectures are to be confined. He asks nothing of those who hear him "beyond the acquaintance which every educated man and woman is supposed to have" with Shakespeare. But Shakespeare is so attractive as well as so great that almost every one of these men and women will possess something beyond this common touch of kindred ; almost every one claims a certain modicum of Shakespearean scholarship. And therefore many will be a little disappointed at first. They will seem to be hearing nothing new. Now and then perhaps the mechanical mind will be excited to dispute a date, and so on. And yet there is a quality here which draws us back to examine it again. The lecturer has carried us with him into the inner sanctuary of Shakespeare's mind ; he has achieved that most difficult feat, not of telling new things, but of winning real apprehension of the old.

Of course it must be understood that Canon Ainger is a scholar refraining himself ; yet the limitations thus

adopted are limitations. Indeed, we can imagine a reader becoming a little impatient as he goes through the first volume, in which the "popular lectures" are for the most part collected; they are somewhat elementary, some of the wit is a trifle ephemeral, here and there a careless sentence may be found. If so, he would do well to be content in the first reading with one or two only of these lectures—we should ourselves choose the set on Swift—and go on at once to the finished essays in the second volume. Any incipient weariness will soon be dispersed there, and afterwards he will be eager to return to the first volume, for he will by that time under- stand what those " lessons " were which determined Canon Beeching, as he tells us in his excellent preface, to print the lectures. No one need be frightened by the term "lessons."

Canon Ainger is far from being a pedagogue, but he has an important truth to elucidate. The great authors, he insists, are moral ; they are humane ; they are true to Nature, not merely on the surface, but in her deep, life-directing operations;

whether they be jesters or tragedians, they are equally true to her, and it is in departing from this, the universal standard by which all literature has been and must be tried, that so much modern work, now praised, will nevertheless perish at last, and even now fails to hold men by any powerful charm. Perhaps he has a few prejudices. No one would call Mr. Gilbert's operas great literature, but are they not worth a little more than he allows? When one of them was acted a year or two ago how many middle-aged persons said that it was wholesome, kindly, different from what the younger generation asks for? Were they too indulgent ? Is it possible that they too had acquired a prejudice of their own P However, in more serious matter his touch is firm :— " We talk with justice of the lifelikeness of Shakespeare's characters. But it is not in that chiefly that his fidelity to truth consists. The characters might themselves be lifelike, and yet be represented as exercising an influence the very reverse of lifelike upon the actions of other characters and the ultimate issue of those actions. It is this which always seems to me a radical • Lectures and Essays. By Alfred Ainger. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. 115e. net.] falsity of the modern drama. Its conception and depicting of character we may sometimes accept; it is too often the perfectly arbitrary and inconsistent issues of such character that strike one as untrae, because based on no true study of human life and of the invincible seqaelts of human destiny arising out of the primary law that 'what is sown is reaped.'" This is convincingly expressed, and both justifies and is itself confirmed by the many passages in which Shakespeare's "sure- footed step in things moral" is noticed. Canon Beeching remarks that— "Through all the lactates there runs the insistence upon what Ainger was accustomed to speak of as the genuine h,umanity of the great men of letters. If he is discussing style, he notices how true feeling and earnestness at once raise and clarify it; he defines euphuism as the putting of manner above matter; he finds the root of real humour, and its superiority over mere wit, in its sympathy with, and reverence for, what is human. It is characteristic of his point of view that he should write upon the

ethical element'- in Shakespeare that he should find more in Swift to censure than to praise, and more in Burns to praise than to censure ; and that he should trace the secret of the Art of Conversation' to certain qualities of the heart rather than of the head."

This is excellently put, though it hardly prepares the reader for the sympathy and kindliness of the lectures on Swift. But Canon Ainger might always be counted upon for sympathy

and kindliness. The ethical principle is nowhere more severely pressed than in the review of Mr. Phillips's Paolo and Francesca, yet the review is only not flattering because

the praise it gives is discriminating ; the appreciation of the good qualities in the drama is so sincere that it must have pleased Mr. Phillips, in spite of the reviewer's disapproval of what he saw to be untrue in it to human nature.

This disapproval is always expressed with the decision of one who sees clearly, but always, too, with the nicety of a scholar. The delightful paper, itself full of genial humanity, on "Mr. Dickens' Amateur Theatricals" contains a good comparison between the attitudes of Dickens and Thackeray towards the creatures of their imagination, but it is instruc- tive to find this completed in the lecture on "True and False Humour" by a further and more finely drawn comparison between Dickens and Thackeray on the one hand, and George Eliot on the other, with regard to the same question. But the finest application of the principle is in the essay on " Coleridge's Ode to Wordsworth," where the history of the ode " Dejection " is traced through its variations of reading, and the pathetic secret of the poem is drawn forth by firm and delicate touches of the analyser's art, yet so that the reverence due to two supreme masters is never forgotten.

As we read this essay, so instinct with controlled emotion, "art for art's sake" becomes a quite unsubstantial

dream. We should call it the best of the whole collec- tion, but that this would be an injustice to the "Charles

Lamb in Hertfordshire," a story of Canon Ainger's first visit to Widford, in which the reader passes from page to page in the pure delight of hearing and seeing; like a school- boy with a book he really enjoys, he does not pause to consider whence the pleasure is derived, but will nevertheless be grateful to Canon Beeching for defining his vague feeling in a couple of lines :—" There is more of the true Elm flavour about it than about many essays written more consciously upon that inimit- able model."

In the paper on "Charles James Mathews" the story is

told of the Australian who objected to that comedian that "he does not act a bit. It is only like a gentleman walking about a drawing-room." The comparison has again and again

come back to us while we have been reading these volumes. The criticism contained in them is clear, firm, discriminating;

it is certainly constructive; but it is not quite the usual thing. It is amateur work according to Hamlet's definition ; "the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense." There may be readers who demand some stronger excitement of their own critical faculty; but there are others, not less

instructed, who will appreciate the rarity of this "daintier sense."