Studies in Two Literatures. By Arthur Symons. (Smithers.)— These criticisms
gathered up from magazines and newspapers have the merit of variety. Some are too slight to be worthy of publication in book form, others are sufficiently elaborate to display Mr. Symons's merits and his defects. In his criticism of M. Catulle Mendes he observes that his prose is full of sur- prising and delicious graces, but that "his misfortune is to be a man of letters who has nothing to say," a fault which is, we think, not uncommon in writers who aim at what is known as " precious- ness " of style. It is true, as Gray says, that good writing not only requires great parts, but the very best of those parts; but great parts are not evident in authors whose painful study of verbal niceties betrays a want of manly thought. We agree with Mr. Symons that extreme attention to form does not necessarily indicate a disregard of substance ; but it does frequently indicate it-, and the author, though generally sensible and suggestive, is not free from this defect. Writing of Mr. Pater, upon whose style and criticism unmeasured praise is lavished, he observes that he was a goldsmith who here and there, thinking to add more value for every trace of gold that he removed, "might seem to have scraped a little too assiduously." In Mr. Symons the trace of gold is sometimes less evident than the scraping. No fault of this kind injures the essay on Christina Rossetti, for whose ex- quisite genius the critic shows a just appreciation ; but we demur to his statement that the work of Mrs. Browning " was really, if we look into it closely, but little more than literature of the L. E. L. order carried to its furthest limits." Mrs. Browning was, no doubt, woefully deficient in taste ; she is not, like Miss Rossetti, a fine artist ; but the author of the passionate sonnets " From the Portuguese," and of much besides that is of rare beauty, has no affinity to a drawing-room singer like " L. E. L." The author's sympathetic criticism of Patinore is worthy of a poet whose unique position is not likely to be affected by time. In a paper on "Modernity in Verse" (a strange term, by the way, for so careful a writer) Mr. Symons reiterates the familiar absurdity that Bohemianism makes for poetry, and that " for the respectable virtues poetry has but the slightest use."
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