MR. F. W. H. MYERS' ESSAYS.*
No reader, however exigent, will expect us, in the space at our disposal, to give anything more than an outline description of, and. a fragmentary comment upon, these volumes. Not that they are bulky, for they contain less than six hundred. pages, not printed too closely for.pleasant reading ; but they are so crowded with the results of reflection and research, and deal with such a variety of interesting subjects, that the critic is baffled, not, as he too often is, by poverty, but rather by the superabundance of interest. The first of the Classical essays treats of Greek Oracles, the last of the Modern essays is devoted to Rossetti and. the religion of beauty ; and between these we have papers on Virgil and Victor Hugo, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Ernest Renan, George Sand and George Eliot, Mazzini and the late Dean Stanley, the poetry of Arch- bishop Trench and, the natural theology of the author of Be.ce • Buses: Clawical —Modern. By F. W. H. Myers. Two rola., published separately. London : Macmillan and Co. Homo. Mr. Myers is to be congratulated upon the catholicity of his tastes and interests, but it is a quality which is occasionally rather perplexing to a conscientious reviewer.
Taking these volumes as a whole, our impression is that they contain nothing quite so good as the best portions of the little book on "Wordsworth," contributed by the author to the useful series of volumes on "English Men of Letters ;" but every one must touch his highest possibility sometime, and Mr. Myers does not seriously disappoint any reasonable expectations raised.
by that admirable contribution to biography and criticism. The style of these essays is lucid, graceful, and dignified, with no defect, indeed, save an occasional strain or affectation of the kind. which spoils so much of our recent prose, and which shows itself in Mr. Myers' pages mainly in fantastic and far-fetched phraseo- logy, as when, for example, we read that one of the prominent characteristics of Archbishop Trench's poems is their expression of "gnomic and sententious calm." These lapses are, however, infrequent, and. for the most part, Mr. Myers' manner is as pleasing as his matter is interesting and instructive.
Of the longest and most elaborate of these essays, that on "Greek Oracles," we must not stay to speak; partly because the majority of the following papers deal with matters of less esoteric interest, and partly because the present writer does not possess the familiarity with this region of research which alone could give him the right to appraise with authority the con- clusions at which Mr.. Myers arrives, though he can appreciate to the -full the clear and interesting manner in which his materials are set forth. In the two other essays included in the Classical volume, those on Virgil and Marcus Autelins, a greater number of us will feel at home; and often as the greatest Roman poet and the noblest Roman emperor have been written upon, the essays of Mr. Myers are inspired by such genuine enthusiasm and understanding that be writes with the freshness and gusto of a discoverer. We were about to say that we like the essay on Virgil less than that on Marcus Aurelius, but there will be greater trnth as well as graciousness in the remark that while we like the former essay much, we like the latter more. Mr. Myers' estimate of Virgil has something of the strain to which we have referred ; the voice of the critic has a falsetto tone, and though there is perhaps nothing in the essay that is really extravagant, nothing for which a more or less good case could not be made out, we seem to be kept perpetually on our guard against the exaggeration of one wbo is a eulogist rather than a critic. Perhaps the opening paragraph, which strikes the key-note of the composition, is largely responsible for this attitude of suspicion. Mr. Myers rhetorically writes :-
"In literature, as in life, affection and reverence may reach a point which disposes to silence rather than to praise. The same ardour of worship which prompts to missions or to martyrdom when a saving knowledge of the beloved object can be communicated so, will shrink from all public expression when the beauty which it reveres is such as can be made manifest to each man only from within. A sense of desecration mingles with the sense of incapacity in describing what is so mysterious, so glorious, and so dear."
This, as Jeffrey said, will never do. We venture to say that an overwhelming majority of those who admire Virgil most, and who think, not without reason, that they understand what it is in his work which is worthy of admiration, will feel that these sentences do not ring true, that they are strained. and unreal, that they are overcharged with that forced emotion which we call sentimentality. We know that it has become the fashion to introduce into criticism the language of spiritual devotion and erotic passion. Mr. Pater, for example, talks about the Frieze of the Parthenon with the same solemn ardour with which a devout Catholic might speak of the Virgin Mary; but it is a bad fashion at the best, and we are sorry to see it followed by so sane and sober a critic as Mr. Myers. Happily the pages which follow are not what might have been expected from such an introduction. Here and there the style is so unduly ecstatic that we instinctively prepare ourselves for protest; but the matter is such that no real necessity for protest ever arises, and we do not praise Mr. Myers too highly whea we say that we know no critic who has expounded more clearly, realisably, and fully those characteristics of Virgil's work, in virtue of which it touches us and comes home to. us more frequently and more keenly than the work of any other poet of the ancient world. Of the essay on Marcus Aurelius we have not space to speak as it deserves. It is both an illuminating and an inspiring study, the worth of which is largely dependant upon the fact that we are bronght into such close proximity svith-the personality of the Imperial Stoic, and in companionship with the man we come really to understand the full meaning of his writings. As Mr. Myers justly remarks, "Character and circumstances, rather than talent or originality, give to the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius their especial value and charm ;" we are interested in what is said for its own sake, but still more for the sake of the sayer; and though it would not have been possible for Mr. Myers to have contributed anything new to our knowledge of the great Antonine, he so groups the old materials as to leave a still more vivid, and veracious impression than we had before.
The contents of the volume of essays dealing with Modern themes are of somewhat unequal value. The article on Mazzini is very thorough, and penetratingly sympathetic, but it would have left a sharper impression upon the mind if the elaborate estimate of Mazzini's character and work had been thrown into bolder relief by an abbreviation of the historical proem, which seems to have—though we hesitate to write the word—a suspicion of tiresomeness. The essay on George Sand, though full of thoughtful analysis, is, to us, the least satisfactory of any of the papers in these volumes. It is difficult to lay a finger on any special passage, and say that it is unsound ; every individual verdict is true enough in itself, but so much that is equally true is omitted ; and the image presented to us is less an image of the real George Sand than of a transfigured eidolon. The want of moral health in the great writer's life is reflected even in those works where the sentiment, as sentiment, is of the purest order, and a critic who fails to perceive this can hardly be implicitly trusted. We turn with pleasure to the trenchant estimate of Victor Hugo, an essay which we commend to the notice of the noisy English clique who for the last few years have been singing shrill hymns to the glory of the literary posturings they regard as the contortions of a mighty Titan, hurling eternal defiance at the Olympus where kings, priests, and we know not what other noxious powers, sit trembling. Mr. Myers does not fail to do justice to what in Hugo's work is worthy of praise,—to his vividness and intensity of imagination, his command over the striking incidents of life and the broad outlines of character, his tenderness of touch when be speaks of the poor and the oppressed and of little children, his splendid mastery of language ; but he exposes with dignified severity his want of knowledge, his want of truth, his want even of the fine sensibility in which he evidently most prides himself, his rhetorical artificiality, and most of all his stupendous egotism, which never sleeps, and never casts a veil over its wakeful face. To any one who has even a fair acquaintance with M. Hugo's works, and who, at the same time, has kept his head, it is not necessary to bring evidence in support of such an indictment; but Mr. Myers, perhaps discreetly, performs this work of supererogation, and makes his case obviously, as well as inherently, impregnable.
Of the articles on George Eliot and Rossetti it is not neces- sary to speak at any length ; they have been so recently pub- lished in another form that they are probably well remembered by the majority of readers. The former deals with George Eliot the woman, rather than with George Eliot the writer; and the record of the impression made by her upon one who knew her well and reverenced her deeply, cannot be without its interest. The essay on "Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty" is full of interesting matter, but seems to us ingenious, rather than instructive. Just as by a patchwork system of quotation, Shakespeare has been proved to be a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist, a lawyer, an accomplished man of science, and lastly, to be somebody else than himself, so by the same system Mr. Myers proves Rossetti to have been a modern " unconscious " Platonist. That Rossetti had a strong mystical bent is true, and all mysticism has its affinities with Platonism ; but in his detailed parallel, Mr. Myers seems to break a butterfly of fancy on the wheel of an elaborate criticism. Two of the most important of the essays are those on M. Renan, and on the notable work, Natural Theology, by the author of Ecce Homo; but we cannot discuss them in a sentence, and will therefore content ourselves with this recogni- tion of their place. We may, however, just remark, interesting as they are, that they are made less satisfactory than they might be by their writer's personal reserve, by his hesitation in com- mitting himself, by his preference for a hypothetical manner of stating views and opinions. We have a general impression of the position which Mr. Myers occupies, but we cannot Bay with certainty that we exactly know where to find him; and if, in our hearing, a reader were to say that he did not know whether
Mr. Myers unmistakably affirmed the being of a Personal God and an individual immortality, we might think him dull of apprehension, but could not accuse him of utter stupidity. This remark may probably surprise Mr. Myers ; but to have clear convictions and to make their clearness visible to all the world are different things, and the difference is hardly sufficiently apprehended by the writer of these papers. In spite, however of their somewhat tantalising tentativeness, they are full of stimulus, and ought not to be missed by any reader of these two attractive volumes.
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