BOOKS.
MR. GOSSE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.*
Mn. GOSSE'S volume is the third in a series, to which Pro- fessor Murray and Professor Dowden have already contributed histories of Greek and French literature respectively. It seems probable that the original idea came from Mr. Gosse; at all events there is no question that he has understood best the admirable and useful thing which there was to be done.
His preface explains, better than we could, the object which he has successfully accomplished
The principal aim which I have had before me in writing this volume has been to show the movement of English literature. I have desired above all else to give the reader, whether familiar with the books mentioned or not, a feeling of the evolution of English literature in the primary sense of the term, the disen- tanglement of the skein, the slow unwinding, down succeeding generations, of the threads of literary expression. To do this without relation to particular authors, and even particular books, seems to me impossible ; to attempt it would be to essay a vague disquisition on style in the abstract, a barren thing at best. To retain the character of an historical survey, with the introduction of the obvious names, has seemed to me essential ; but I have endeavoured to keep expression, form, technique, always before me as the central interest rather than biography, or sociology, or mere unrelated criticism."
We have taken the liberty of italicising an important clause, and we congratulate Mr. Gosse sincerely on the skill with which he has given effect to it. Any one interested in litera- ture can read any part of this book with pleasure and advan- tage; the criticism, admirably calculated to send one to originals, does so by provoking interest in them, not by needing illustration which is not supplied ; and it is continuous and constructive criticism, not detached morsels of judgment. Mr. Gosse has looked steadily at our literature from a single point of view, and consequently the history unrolls itself like a map as you read him. Naturally such a method is not exhaustive; it is like studying the geography of a country by following the course of a single great river; on either side of it lie great tracts of which you know nothing save by the affluents which they send down ; but the method has the merit of being interesting and easily intelligible. We know of no volume better fitted to give a general conception of our literature than this ; it is always brilliantly written, always suggests ideas, and never de-
generates into what Mr. Gosse stigmatises as "a gabble of facts."
The reader who turns to it for an account of a subject with which he himself is tolerably familiar will have, as a rule, the great pleasure of sympathising; and there is nothing more agreeable to read than intelligent praise of what one likes. He will also, in most cases, have the scarcely inferior pleasure of acutely disagreeing on certain points. Mr. Gosse has the courage of his convictions, and never hesitates to assert views which will undoubtedly draw literary brickbats as thick as midges about his ears. For ourselves, we confess to having felt a momentary regret that his remarks about Bacon's essays were not legally justiciable. "No work in the English language," he observes, "has been praised with more thoughtless extravagance. It has one great merit, it tended to break up the encumbered and sinuous Elizabethan sentence, and prepare for prose as Dryden and Halifax wrote it. But its ornament is largely borrowed from the school of Lyly and Lodge, its thoughts are commonplaces, and its arrangement of parts is desultory and confused." If Bacon's thoughts are commonplaces, that is precisely because Bacon fixed them for ever in a brief form of words as imperishable as the language, and almost as widely familiar. However, there is always a grain of critical judgment in a good critic's worst aberrations, and Bacon certainly exercised little formative influence upon English prose. Mr. Goose is seldom at his beet when writing of the Elizabethans or Jacobeans; his criticism begins to be admirable when he reaches Waller, whom he calls the English Malherbe. The parallel, of course, • A Short History of Modern English Literature. Br Edmund Goose, Hon, M A. of Trin. Colt, Carob. "Literatures of the World." London : W. Heinemann, somewhat exaggerates Waller's importance; yet it is clear that he set himself, as Malherbe did, to remedy the slackness of contemporary prosody by closer attention to the internal structure of each verse. Crashaw and Cowley have their moments of inspiration, but the quick vitality of Eliza. bethan work had disappeared before their day; Fletcher, with all his sweetness, had set the example of a dangerous relaxation. What Waller began, as it would seem of his own proper motion, was carried on in conscious defereace to French criticism by Dryden and Dryden's contemporaries ; yet among those con- temporaries were three great survivals,—Butler, whose Hudt. bras Mr. Gosse strangely underrates, Marvell, and Milton, not one of whom shows a trace of French influence. Perhaps Mr. Gosse overrates that alien force. It is surely too much to say that Milton's "influence on the age he lived in was nil, and that to unprejudiced persons of education living in London about 1665 the author of Paradise Lost' was something less than Flecknoe or Flatman." Marvell was a popular and highly respected Member of Parliament, celebrated for his wit in a day when wit was the object of all ambitions, and we know what Marvell thought of Milton. The mere fact that "Paradise Lost" went through three editions in twelve years proves sufficiently that persons of education—for no one else would read Milton—were not so stupid as Mr. Gone would make out. He may, of course, mean that Milton only became an influence after the publication of "Paradise Lost "- which appeared in 1667—but, probably by a slip, he misdates its appearance.
It is always a little difficult to review a book of this sort, which covers an immense subject, especially when one has nothing but commendation for the general lines of its arrangement. There are innumerable opinions of Mr. Gorse's from which we should dissent, but mere expres- sions of dissent are not worth recording; there are many omissions which we deplore, but there must be omissions, and probably Mr. Gosse also deplores them ; while on the whole we applaud his selection. If we were to choose a particular merit for praise it would be his constant and illuminating references to French literature, and his estimate of its effect upon English writers. We wish that we could confine ourselves to a discussion of Mr. Gosse as a critic, but the first duty of a reviewer is to resent misuses of language, and of these we regret to say his book affords several examples. Some may be due to mere carelessness in proof-reading; for instance, "irradicable" for " ineradicable." Again, for Earle's Microcos. mography (or "miniature map of the universe ") he prints " Microcosmogony " ("pocket creation "). Mr. Gosse uses the word "orotund," for which we regret to find authority in the Century Dictionary ; Johnson would never have admitted such a compound from ore rotund°, and it amazes us that any scholar should sanction it. What, again, does Mr. Gosse mean by talking of Newman's "pure and styptic style" ? The word in Greek has the sense of "astringent," but in English we limit its use to such things as effect a physical contraction—for instance, of remedies for closing a wound—and even supposing it can be taken as a synonym for "astringent," what is an astringent style P It is not our custom to pick holes for the pleasure of the exer- cise, but it would be a species of literary dishonesty to praise a book so highly as we have praised this one and to ignore these lapses. They do not affect the merit of the criticism, but such misuse of words by a writer of Mr. Gorse's ability and influence is much to be regretted. He is not a lady novelist that he should do this thing, but a scholar to whom our literature owes a real debt.
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