BOOKS.

PROFESSOR SHAIRP'S ESSAYS.

THESE four thoughtful and wise essays of Professor Shairp's are worthy of both reading and musing over. His subjects,—Words- worth, Coleridge, Treble, and the moving force of the moral life (which we wish had not been called by so scholastic and scaring a title as 'The Moral Dynamic')—are all, and not slightly, connected. All four subjects may be said to be concerned with the relation of the divine life to that of man,—Wordsworth as the prophet of nature, as the poet who interpreted the relations between the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man,—Coleridge as the thinker who tried to find, and partially found, a philosophy of our supersensual life,—Keble as the singer who applied both these great worlds of thought so far as they fitted into the limitations of his own refined but narrow ecclesiastical system ; and finally, the subject of Mr. Shairp's last essay,—the great moving force which helps man to become what he perceives that he ought to be, —is one almost inevitably suggested by the lives of the three men who, from their different points of view, had all been chiefly con- cerned to discover new links betweeti the life above and the life beneath.

• Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. By J. C. Shairp, Professor of Humanity, St. Andrew's. Edinburgh: E Imonstou and Douglas.

In all these essays Professor Shairp has much to say that shows how deeply he has studied his subjects ; but the finest essay in the volume, partly perhaps because it is upon the greatest and most definite subject, is the first, on Wordsworth. Yet it is also the one in which Professor Shairp's readers will possibly find most to criticize. The sentences in which Professor Shairp sums up Wordsworth's poetical claims upon the admiration of the world are among the truest and finest in the volume ; yet they do not seem to us to exhaust the most characteristic of Wordsworth's poetic qualities :—

" In fact, no poet of modern times has had in him so much of the prophet. In the world of nature, to be a revealer of things bidden, the sanctifier of things common, the interpreter of new and unsuspected relations, the opener of another sense in men ; in the moral world, to be the teacher of truths hitherto neglected or unobserved, the awakener of men's hearts to the solemnities that encompass them, deepening our reverence for the essential soul, apart from accident and circumstance, making us feel more truly, more tenderly, more profoundly, lifting the thoughts upward through the shows of time to that which is permanent and eternal, and bringing down on the transitory things of eye and ear some shadow of the eternal, till we

" ' feel through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness '—

this is the office which he will not cease to fulfil, as long as the English language lasts. What earth's far-off lonely mountains do for the plains and the cities, that Wordsworth has done and will do for literature, and through literature for society ; sending down great rivers of higher truth, fresh purifying winds of feeling, to those who least dream from what quarter they come. The more thoughtful of each generation will draw nearer and observe him more closely, will ascend his imaginative heights, and sit under the shadow of his profound meditations, and in proportion as they do so, will become more noble and pure in heart."

That is finely and truly said, but we doubt if Professor Shairp insists sufficiently on the affinity of Wordsworth's poetry for the great elemental forces both of nature and of humanity.- He tells us, with great truth, in one passage of his essay, that Wordsworth seizes the individuality and inner genius of particular scenes and places as no other poet ever did:— "When be would place some particular landscape before the reader, he does not heap up an exhaustive enumeration of details. Only one or two of the most essential features are faithfully given, and then from these he passes at once to the sentiment, the genius of the place, that which gives it individuality, and makes it this and no other place. Numerous instances of the way in which he seizes the inner spirit of a place and utters it will occur to every reader. To give one out of many, after sketching briefly the outward appearance of the four fraternal yew trees of Borrowdale, who else could have condensed the total impressions into such lines as these, so intensely imaginative, so profoundly true?—

"'Beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked

With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes May meet at noontide ; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight ; Death the Skeleton, And Time the Shadow ; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple, scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship; or in mute repose To lie and listen to the mountain flood,

Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.'" This criticism of Mr. Shairp's is true, but it seems to us true less because Wordsworth individualizes, than because he seizes the thread of some great natural influence which is present and predominant in the particular place described, but still confused and half obliterated by other influences, and lays it naked to the imagination of the reader in all the sublimity it derives, not only from this particular scene, but from the character it has impressed on a multitude of other scenes and places, and thus magnifies it till the individual locality is absolutely haunted by an influence the predominance of which an ordinary imagination would only just have detected. Thus, in the fine passage Mr. Shairp has extracted on the four yew trees of Borrowdale, you are immediately carried away by the " festal " but " unrejoicing berries," and by the pic- ture of the ghostly shapes meeting in their shade at noon-tide —Fear and Hope, Silence and Foresight, Death and Time,—all abstractions of men's trembling imagination,—to all those aspects of nature which half paralyze the mind of man and dispose it rather to appease unknown powers with the mere sacerdotal semblance of joy, than to pierce and fathom them, and to exult in that sublime familiarity with the powers of nature which thence results. In that passage Wordsworth snatches you away by the bold stroke which connects the ghostly Yews decked in their red berries, with the shadows and skeletons of man's own heart decked iu its pro- pitiatory fears and hopes, to all influences in human nature which daunt us against entering into the life of true knowledge and hardy love. And this seems to us to be Wordsworth's wonderful power, that he never really individualizes at all without so magni- fying some one predominant influence that the scene he describes

seems to dissolve away into some one of the elemental forces connecting nature with human life. And, when Wordsworth, generalizing from ordinary village sorrows in the Cumbrian dales, says,—

"Beneath the hills, amid the flowery groves, The generations are prepared ; the pangs, The internal pangs are ready ; the dread strife Of poor humanity's afflicted will, Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny,"

he applies the same elemental conceptions to the moral life of man which he is so great in tracing in the life of nature. He speaks of " the pangs, the internal pangs," as he would speak of winds and storms,—treats the moral elements which mould and furrow the hearts of men as he does those which harden and furrow their cheeks ; and he speaks of the former, moreover,—the spiritual pangs,—with a grand incidental naturalness,—as if they really belonged to the hills and groves under the shadows of which " the generations are prepared." It seems to us that Mr. Shairp in his fine criticism on Wordsworth has not insisted enough on this power which the poet displays of giving a strange elemental vastness to the dominant thread of character in either the human or the natural subject on which he happens to be dwelling, so that his poem yields up not a particular man or a particular place, so much as some element which, while belonging to either, stretches away into the infinite. And hence we cannot but differ to some extent from Mr. Shairp in his assault on those critics who have called Wordsworth's poetry by that very odious abstract term "subjective :"- "Much stuff has been talked and written about Wordsworth being a merely subjective poet. Critics had good need to be sure they were right before they characterize great poets by such vague, abstract words; for they quickly get into the minds of the reading public, and stick there, and do much mischief. True it is that Wordsworth has read his own soul, not that which was accidental or peculiar in him, but that which he had in common with all high and imaginative men. But is this all? has he done nothing more ? If ever man caught the soul of things, not himself, and expressed it, Wordsworth did. That he has done it in nature almost limitlessly we have seen. In man he has done it not less truly, though more restrictedly. Taking the restrictions at their utmost, what contemporary poet (I do not speak of Scott in his novels) has left to his country such a gallery of new and individual portraits as a permanent possession? The deeper side of character no doubt it is,—the heart of men, not their clothes,—but it is character in which there is nothing of himself, nothing which all men might not or do not share. The Affliction of Margaret, the Mad Mother, Gipsies, Laodamia, the Highland Reaper, the Waggoner, Peter Bell, Matthew, Michael, the Cumberland Beggars, all the tenants of the Churchyard among Mountains—what are these ? What, but so many separate, individual, outstanding portraits, into which all of himself that enters is only the eye that can see and read their souls, on their deeper side. For it is not their outward contour, nor their complexion, nor dress he busies himself with. He painted, as Titian and Leonardo did their great portraits, with the deeper soul predominating in the countenance. If he seized this, he cared little for the rest. Let us discard, then, that foolish talk about Wordsworth as a merely subjective poet, who could give nothing but his own feelings, or copies of his own countenance."

We should say that Mr. Shairp here is both right and wrong. He is of course quite right, if he means that Wordsworth, as a poet, did not merely feed on his own life, but observed keenly and spiritualized what he observed with all the strength of his own rugged imagination. But we should hesitate to call any one of these delineations an individual portrait in the same sense, or to anything like the same degree, as the great portraits of Titian and Leonardo may be called individual portraits. "The Affliction of Margaret," for instance, is not a picture of an individual at all. No one could paint any individual lineaments from the poem. It is a wonderful delineation of a haunting maternal passion which has gained a desolate ruggedness and intensity and despair from the suspense of years. The following is not the picture of an individual mother who knows not her son's fate, but the anguish of maternity itself, which has but one focus for its love, and fills all nature with its woe till it be answered :—

" My apprehensions come in crowds ; I dread the rustling of the grass ; The very shadows of the clouds Have power to shake me as they pass; I question things, and do not find One that will answer to my mind,— And all the world appears unkind. " Beyond participation lie

My troubles and beyond relief : If any chance to heave a sigh, They pity me, and not my grief. Then come to me, my Son, or send Some tidings, that my woes may end : I have no other earthly friend !"

And in Mr. Shairp's other instances, " the Mad Mother," "the Soli- tary Reaper," " Peter Bell," and the others, we see never, or rarely ever, individual portraits, but some single trait is taken fast hold of by the imagination of the poet, and so handled that it transports us into an infinite world of which this is the chief elemental influence, —the individual serving only as a mere point of departure for a whole tide of thronging associations. Thus, one knows nothing of " the Solitary Reaper," for instance, except that she sings her sweet and simple song till

" the vale profound Is overflowing with the sound,"

and that we are snatched away by her song into all the different fields of association which sweet and homely music, coming from the very heart, can summon up. If the terrible word " subjective " means that poetry so described takes no note of external life and nature, it has, of course, no application to Wordsworth. But if it means that the individual imagination of the poet so overbalances the external features of his object that the point of departure seems in the end to have dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the grandeur of the forces which it has called up before him, we should differ with Mr. Shairp. Wordsworth takes a scene or character, and setting it under the magnifying glass of his medi- tative genius, he follows out the most striking train of associations it suggests to him till he describes, not his subject, but what his subject might have been if these special influences had swept through it as pure and unalloyed as they swept over the heart of the poet who muses thereon.

We have said so much of Mr. Shairp's first and perhaps finest essay, that we can only say of the other three that they are fully worthy to stand beside it ; that if they are not quite so deep in interest, it is not for want of fully as truthful and precise a treat- ment by the essayist, but only from either the greater vagueness or the smaller dimensions of the subjects. The essay on Keble is singularly fair and true, though we doubt whether Mr. Shairp dwells quite enough on the marked limitation of that refined but not very vigorous poet's genius. Sounder and wiser criticism we do not often meet with than Professor Shairp's.