MR. W. E. HENLEY AS CRITIC.*
Tars is one of the most remarkable volumes of literary criti- cism—in more senses than one it is the most striking—that have appeared for a number of years. Mr. Henley has been known for a considerable time as one of the most fearless, if not also as one of the most uncompromising, of art critics, the sworn foe of conventionality in "paint" and of flabby timidity in writing the truth about it. More recently he pub- lished a volume of poems, full of character, and in which "our lady of pain" figured as a reality of the writer's experience, not as a mere Swinburnian phantom. And now, in this volume of Views and Reviews, he figures as a prose critic in literature. It is true, no doubt, as Mr. Henley says himself, that it is "less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism ;" in other words, that it is essentially a reprint of literary characterisa-
• Violas and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation. By W. E. Henley. London: David Batt. 1890.
tions which have been published in various weekly journals. But into these, to some extent, no doubt, because of their enforced brevity, he has striven to throw as much of himself as possible, and he has met with no inconsiderable success. 'This volume gives us its author's opinions—in some cases, his prejudices—on almost all things in literature, and not a few in heaven and earth as well.
When it is noted that this volume consists of less than two hundred and fifty pages, and yet of more than forty articles, and that these deal with almost every great and almost every secondary name in modern, not to speak of classic, literature, it will be seen that Mr. Henley does not give himself much elbow-room. His book, therefore, is not so much one of literary criticism, in the ordinary and proper sense of the word, as of brilliant table-talk. What, indeed, could be expected in a small volume which deals with Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Hugo, Dumas and Byron, Rabelais and Tennyson, Balzac and Heine, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, Fielding and Richardson, not to speak of a thousand and one of the dii minores of literature ? Sometimes this table-talk style of criticism is quite adequate to the occasion. It is decidedly so in the case of Disraeli, who, as a literary artist, lived in and for phrases, and who therefore should always be served up in epigram. Mr. Henley is, indeed, in error when he says of Disraeli as a novelist, that "nothing is too lofty or too low for him." Disraeli never descended even into Dickensish depths of human nature. But what Mr. Henley says of Disraeli's female characters is near the mark,—though he overrates Mr. Disraeli's power of delineation,—when he says that "the finest are not those he likes best, but those who interested him most. Male and female, his eccentrics surpass his commonplaces. He had a great regard for girls, and his attitude towards them, or such of them as he elected heroines, was mostly one of adoration,—magnificent, yet a little awkward and strained. With women, married women, he had vastly more in common; he could admire, study, divine, without having to feign a warmer feeling ; and while his girls are poor albeit splendid young persons, his matrons are usually delightful." But Mr. Henley's method of criticism fails when he deals with subjects which require breadth of treatment. Thus he does not succeed with Arnold. He is just, and even generous, in some of his criticisms, as when he speaks of "the mixture of mischievousness and charm, of supercilious- ness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity of phrase unique in modern letters" that characterised the language in which Arnold embodied his message to humanity. But he falls to do justice to, or even to realise, that high serious- ness which was quite as much of a reality in the case of Arnold as his irony, for it will not suffice to explain this side of Arnold's life and work by saying simply that he was "an artist in ethics as in speech." If Mr. Henley has failed considerably with Arnold, he has failed egregiously with George Eliot. He may have a poor Opinion of her art ; he may disapprove of her mission. But it is useless to ignore the fact that she was one of the greatest forces that the English literature of our time can show. She cannot be explained away, much less vanquished, by a choice collection of gibes. It is evident that Mr. Henley has no patience with the literature—least of all with the fiction—of introspection ; obviously he considers it as so much sentimentalism or "bleat." But it is an unquestionable, perhaps even por- tentous fact, and one that cannot be adequately treated in a few after-dinner phrases, however smart—and many are a great deal more than smart—in themselves.
Speaking of Arnold, Mr. Henley says : "You feel as you read him, that in truth his mind was French." The same thing may be said of Mr. Henley himself, although he is not at all French in the sense that Arnold was. He is an enthusiastic student of French fiction ; his heart is rather with Dumas than with Fielding, or even Scott ; uncon- sciously, perhaps, he seeks to make a coup in every sentence. His study of Balzac is disappointing and snippety, although it is cruelly correct to say of the author of the Comgclie, that "his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer." But Mr. Henley's " appreciations " of Hugo and Dumas are admirable in their way, and in spite of their narrow limits, positively exhaustive. Take both the shade and the light of "Hugo." How true it is that "all his life long he was addicted to attitude ; all his life long he was a poseur of the purest water. He seems to have considered the affectation of superiority an essential quality in art ; for just as the cock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him crow, so to the poet of the Legende and the Contemplations it must have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made of his 'oracular' tongue "! But this is not sounder criticism than that "Hugo is almost a literature in himself ; and if it be true that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity of Shakespeare's, as it is in the exquisite good sense of Voltaire's, it is also true that he left the world far richer than he found it." Still finer—at all events, richer and more cordial —than " Hugo " is " Dumas ; " and yet Mr. Henley allows that his favourite is neither a Shakespeare nor an 2Eschylus, not even an Augier. Taken altogether, Views and Reviews will provoke quite as much censure as commendation, for whatever may be Mr. Henley's faults, a commonplace habit of looking at men and things is not one of them. He is a master of a most remarkable and attractive style,—sometimes, indeed, he seems to be the servant of it. His book, therefore, deserves to be read, and will be read. And yet, unless we are much mistaken, it is but its author's preliminary canter in the field of criticism.
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