The Literary Pages of the " Spectator " F OR a

hundred years the Spectator was surprisingly the same in its literary outlook ; very quick to recognize solid achievement, a little slower to praise talent that came with disruptive and unusual vigour. It took Marryatt, George Eliot, and Mrs. Oliphant more to its heart on their first appearance than Dickens, the Brontës, or Meredith. But in looking through old numbers no one can fail to be struck by the deep and level soundness of its appreciations. Even when the balance of our judgment has since swung in other directions, the elements of our criticism remain much the same. The qualities which the Spectator blamed in Dickens or Browning we still count as blemishes ; but these writers have been accepted into the body of our literature and the final word no longer hangs in the balance.

It is not very profitable, then, to read through the Spectator in the hope of finding giant howlers. There may be a smattering of these : as when the Spectator declared, " of all the bards of the present century Campbell has the surest chance of becoming the poet of posterity " ; or when it remarked that one of Blake's Songs of Innocence " appears to have been written under the influence of eau suer& " ; or when it sedulously raised Sir William Watson to equality with Wordsworth and Milton. On the whole, a mere shift of emphasis will correct its worst mistakes.

In writing a survey of the Spectator's outlook on literature during its hundred years of existence, it will perhaps be best to divide the time into four periods of roughly a quarter of a century. In each of these periods we shall see what the general views of the paper were, what notable contributors it had, how it regarded the work of established writers and how it received the young and emerging talent of its time. Through the whole of this survey we are very much indebted to the explorations which Sir William Beach Thomas has conducted for his newly published The Story of the " Spectator," 1828-1928.

EARLY CONTRIBUTORS, 1828-50 There were two very notable contributors to the correspondence columns : Charles Lamb, who wrote two letters on old popular songs, and Benjamin Haydon, the prodigious historical painter, friend of Keats and Leigh Hunt, surprised and respectful worshipper at the shrine of his own genius. The Spectator preserved a great admiration for Haydon. He filled its corres- pondence columns, under his own name, as " Old Dilettante," or as " A Constant Reader," with vigorous, long and amusing letters. He poured out vituperation against all who neglected historical painting, against the heartless creditors who pursued him, against water-colour artists and men who mixed their paints with white ; Turner in especial as the founder of the whole miserable school. But his chief quarrel was with the Academicians. He prophesied decay and doom to the arts because they had despised his counsel. " What did I know in comparison with the Academician ? " he asked, with his finest sarcasm. "—Nothing ! What was I ?—Nothing A mere man of genius, a cat in the streets I " u They form " (he wrote) " a species between the washed iournernan and the dressed gentleman : you at once distinguish them from the crowd. If they talk among themselves, it is planning how to thwart a rival. If you should want to shake hands, they offer a cold, clammy, heartless forefinger. They never think but to devise some mode of giving pain ; never speak but to mortify ; never praise but to damn faintly ; and when their feelings boil up and become uncontrollable, so that they damn outright, it is because the talent they wish to destroy is too powerful to be undermined by insinuation. And these, are the men in whose hands have ignorantly been placed the destinies of British art, her taste in manufactures; and her prolific genius for seventy years." The burden of his complaint was always the same. " While a dirty bypath is within reach, an Academician never can, never did, and never will walk boldly up the Queen's highway."

CARLYLE.

Later in the same period there were two articles in his most magniloquent style from Thomas Carlyle. They have been reprinted for the first time by Sir William Beach Thomas in his Story of the "Spectator." Both of them are full of moral earnestness, full of fury, astonishing by their verbiage : " The law of nature itself makes us now, in every fibre, par- ticipant of Ireland's wretchedness. Steam-passage from Ireland is occasionally as low as fourpence a head. Not a wandering Irish lackall that comes over to us, to parade his rags and hunger, and sin and misery, but comes in all senses as an irrepressible missionary of the like to our people ; an inarticulate prophet of God's justice to Nations ; heralding to us also a doom like his own. Of our miseries and fearful entanglements here in Britain, he, the Irish lackall, is by far the heaviest ; and we cannot shake him off. No, we have deserved him ; by our incompetence and unveracity—by our cowardly, false, and altogether criminal neglect of Ireland—by our government of make-believe and not of truth and reality, so long continued there, we have deserved him ; and suddenly, by the aid of steam and Modern progress of the sciences, we have got him. '

ATTITUDE TO ESTABLISHED WRITERS.

When Rintoul came to London, perhaps his chief idol in letters was Sir Walter Scott. His poetry had already a little faded in popular esteem ; the Waverley Novels were still the wonder of the world.

It may have been Rintoul ; it may have been a com- patriot : but certainly one member of the staff knew the great Sir Walter personally and wrote recollections of him in the paper. " It is certain,"- he said, " that the enthusiasts of 2028, or 3038 (if a comet singe not our orb before that sera), will wish as devoutly to see and hear what we have seen and heard, as we desire to see and hear what the contemporaries of Homer and Milton saw and heard."

With this admiration of Scott was joined almost a worship of Byron. His death was still recent ; he was still felt to be a bright and disastrous wandering star. When the news of his death was announced, half the young ladies of Great Britain wept inconsolably to think that they had no longer a chance to love and reform this darling of the gods. Shelley, too, was a luminary in the wake of Byron ; they shared the same quarter of the heavens and cast light upon each other. In apprecia- tion of these two the Spectator was generous ; it scarcely even apologized for their vices. Its only complaint against Shelley was that he had been led astray by the fascinations of the Cockney and Lake Schools.

As we might gather, its attitude to Wordsworth was more distant. It took much the same view as Browning of the Lake School's wholesale conversion to respec- tability ; and when Wordsworth complained in a sonnet that the Poet Laureate should be better paid, it repri- manded him severely :- " It may be questioned Whether posterity will take the poet at his own valuation : and since the subject is forced upon us, it may be remarked, that Mr. Wordsworth's literary merits years ago procured him, we believe, an easy and not unlucrative public office, or one, at least, which yields him a much higher income than the most distinguished of his poetical predecessors enjoyed."

Keats was no more mentioned in the Spectator than in other contemporary journals. • Even in 1850, the Spectator was still saying :— " Although we are no very great admirers of the poems of Keats (his poetical genius which was insufficiently developed at his death is another matter), it must be allowed that Keats revived if he did not originate the fanciful school of poetry."

RECEPTION OF NEW WRITERS.

The reviewers had a gift of sarcasm which could be let loose with devastating effect upon any pretentious new work. When, for example, a poet published an epic which he claimed to have kept to himself for twenty years, the Spectator said to him : " We think, that if the author had suppressed The Deluge altogether, after suppressing it so long, he would have displayed an unimpeachable judgment." Mrs. Hemans, Laetitia Landon, and Barry Cornwall fell under the same lash ; and there was a review of Robert Montgomery's Messiah which is almost a match for Macaulay's own Essay :— " He boasts, in his Preface, of the ' great and good ' who have sought his acquaintance. Among them will be found Bishops and patrons, to reward with a snug vicarage the young man who, in these scarce times of poetry, has condescended to sing the mysteries of heaven, earth and hell, from the Deity to Satan, straight through, almost without stopping. There are an immense number of good and well-disposed persons in this country, who, having never been taught that there is any thing in poetry save solemn sound, will find this work swell and fall with much sanctified majesty, and therefore feel delighted that they have got hold of a safe book, less dull than their ordinary reading. Such persons, male and female old ladies, will go from tea party to tea party, chanting the praises of the New Milton ; and as they are very frequently rich as well as saintly, they will buy the book, and Robert Montgomery will have his reward."

The first new author of importance to be greeted by the Spectator was Bulwer Lytton. He published Pelham anonymously and was met with considerable disdain. The hero of Pelham, that affectedly fashionable young miracle of talent, was the very kind to rouse the spleen of a good Scots editor. " We have heard of castle- building," -wrote the reviewer, " but this is all sheer baby-fancy." Next year he was no more lightly treated ; his writing was called " clever but offensive." Another writer of the same school was dismissed as curtly : the Spectator never appreciated the talent of the young virtuoso, Benjamin Disraeli. When Lytton published Paul Clifford in 1830, the Spectator melted a little. There were still biting words said :- " The slang, the depravity, the grossness of the persons intro duced, and represented to the life, may be expected to produce very much the same effect as three weeks at the treadmill—where, such is the author's facility at imitation, it might shrewdly be suspected that he has passed a brief portion of his existence."

The reviewer referred, however, to his display of a " higher order of powers ". and congratulated him upon his " consistency and fidelity in the drawing of a character." When Lytton abandoned the ways of his youth and took to writing historical novels, the Spectator praised him without afterthought.

TENNYSON AND BROWNING.

In 1830 appeared a work which brings us to the end of the Romantic period and leads us full into the days of the Victorians. Alfred Tennyson published his first separate volume, Poems chiefly Lyrical. It is hard to see Tennyson coming as a revolutionary shock ; but when we compare these poems of his youth with the general mass of verse which was being written around him, we feel the difference immediately : his note was original and he was ushering in a new period. The Spectator received him hospitably :— " This little volume is the production, we have been told, of a Cambridge man who gained the Chancellor's medal last year for English verse. We have no great liking for prize poetry ; but it was with a sort of agreeable surprise, that, after being told of Mr. Tennyson's academical achievements, we find, on glancing over the present work, that he had produced a volume of very Pleasant verses—a volume in which a good deal has been effected, and in which there is no uncertain indication of much more to be done."

Tennyson's succeeding volumes were not wholly approved, and the Spectator often reproached him for his failure to live up to his early promise. " The most obvious defect," the reviewer wrote in 1842, " is his diction ; which, as in other writers in what is called the cockney school, is piebald with the spots of various times—an obsolete word here, a cant phrase there, and anon a vulgarism by way of being natural." Even when In Memoriam appeared the comments had still their flavour of acidity :— " The nature of the plan is favourable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's distinguishing characteristics. The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and meta- physical reflections : where he is not quite so excellent."

Five years after Tennyson's first volume, the Spectator for the first time took notice of Robert Browning. When Paracelsus was published, the Spectator remarked that " evidences of mental power and, perhaps, of poetical talent are visible throughout ; but there is no nice con- ception and development of character, nothing big and striking in the thoughts, whilst the language in which they are clothed gives them an air of mystical or dreamy vagueness." In later days, it was to reproach him as it reproached Tennyson, with having written all his best work in his first books ; but when the first books were published it gave him small praise. The typical attitude to Browning appears in a late review :- "There are no more original works of imagination in the English

language—it is hard to call them poems, and it is harder still to call them anything else."

It was still longer before we were won to the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

DICKENS AND THACKERAY.

The whole territory of English letters, and even places where letters had never before penetrated, were suddenly shaken by the burst of a new genius. In 1886 Dickens began to publish in serial numbers, Sketches by Bo:, and followed them with the Papers of the Pickwick Club. This event we announced as follows : " No writer ever attained a general popularity so instantly as Boz, and certainly no one has made such industrious use of his advantage. Like the ' wag ' in society, he is seized by the multitudinous hands of the public, and meets with a spontaneous and universal welcome. . . . What wonder, then, that Boz's Sketches are in constant demand at the circulating libraries ; that they find a place in the travelling carriage, the steam boat, the stage coach, and the road side inn ; Pickwick is the idol of the watering places and the travellers' room."

The Spectator gave much thought to explaining this instant fame. From the very beginning it admitted Dickens' great genius ; yet it felt his extravagances with a peculiar pain. In reviewing Nicholas Nickleby it offered the following explanation of his success :

" The first quality is, no doubt, his perfect plainness, the common life character of his subjects, and the art with which he imparts vitality to the literal and whatsoever lies on the surface. He calls upon his reader for no exertion—requires from him no mental elevation. He who runs may read Boz—' he is plain to the meanest capaciety.' In addition to this, he has a kind of con- ventional Cockney humour, best described by a phrase from its own dialect, werry funny.' But, mingled with such qualifica- tions for mob-pleasing, are powers of a higher order. He has much of the most electric spirit for operating upon the vulgar, where no appeal can be made to their interests or their prejudice —the real spirit of humanity, which spoke in Terence's Homo sum ; nil humanum a me alienum puto.' Boz has also touches of pathos, and of tragic sadness ; he sometimes utters, sometimes suggests, penetrating reflections ; and he has often points of universal truth. These things have not only contributed to give Boz part of his popularity ; but have redeemed his literalness from the meanness and dryness of the inventorial style, and raised his production above the mere ephemera of the day ; whilst the quaint and homely manner in which his best thoughts are mostly expressed, add to his present popularity, whatever may be their future effect."

It is only necessary to compare the Spectator with other staid journals of the time to see that its appreciation of Dickens was unusual. It never accused him, for example, on the score of such peccadilloes as " disrespect to the clergy." It allowed him a position far above the other novelists of his time. It even approved his style at a time when other serious papers were speaking of it as vulgar and disgraceful: Perhaps some of their approval of Dickens was drawn from Them by his social enthusiasms; for the Spectator, too, was engaged in exposing abuses. At any rate, it is certain that, taking everything into account, the Spectator received Dickens well. Perhaps it gave a more genial reception to .Thackeray. It com- plained of the aimlessness of his novels, and, when Pendennis appeared, remarked " It is an established fact that Mr. Thackeray cannot or will not form a coherent story." There was more heat, however, more admiration and castigation combined, in its notices of Dickens.

MACAULAY AND CARLYLE.

. Macaulay got praise for the rattle of his style and roused indignation for his politics : " Mr. Macaulay is a clever and brilliant man ; he is a fine Writer ; and, when he has time to prepare himself, a great orator. Iti writing and in speaking he pours out a torrent of fine-sounding words, and often even of good and appropriate words. He is fond of antithesis ; he loves a paradox ; he is imaginative ; and he is a thoiough Whig. But all this is no proof that he is gifted with faculties which will enable him to construct a code of good laws for 80 millions of people, whom he never saw, and of whose manners, institutions, and many languages, he is at the present moment as ignorant as if the 80 millions in question were inhabitants of the -planet Saturn."

Four years later the Spectator comes- to the charge again : - - • • . " No subaltern, surely, was ever so well provided for by his party as Mr. Macaulay ; for he will have received at the rate of 10,000/. a piece for ever one of the five speeches which he made on their behalf in the House of Commons. All this is on the • condition that, his Indian. life is .to- be passed in: the'-negative - condition of a soul in the Ilindoo Paradise, neither doing nor suffering good or evil ; or like that of the god Vishnu; whb slept - for a thousand years on a lotus-flowe e.Such, _however, is not ,

d

the case ; Mr. Macaulay has been oing mischief' on a- con-

siderable scale." - -- •

- In 1837 the Spectator reported in a leading article the lectures of it Mr. T. Carlisle, as they called hirn- Mr. Carlisle delivered the first of. a course of lectures on German literature, at Willis's Room, on Tuesday, to a very crowded and . yet a select audience of both' sexes. - Mr. Carlisle may lie deficient in the mere mechanism of oratory ; but this minor defect is, far more than counterbalanced by his perfect mastery of his subject, the originality of his manner, the perspicuity' of -his languaie, his simple but genuine eloquence, and his 'vigorous grasp of a large and difficult question. No person of 'taste and judgment could hear him without feeling that the lecturer is a man of genius, deeply imbued with his great arguments." • When Sartor Resartus appeared anonymously, however, - the Spectatbr gave it only a Short - • - • !` Under the guiso of a review or translation of a volume of ,a German Professor on Clothes, a Vehicle is made for descriptive riitieule of German scholastic -habits ;and tractates, mingled with • shrewd and pithy remarks ; .tait the purpose of the author is not very intelligible, and he spins Out the thread of his-jest too long."

NEWMAN, KINGSLEY AND THE BROM111S. ,

Before this period was out, almost all the more cele- brated Victorians, men who lift their stamp .on their age, whese works we think of as typical, had begun to publish. The Spectator's sympathies were catho' lic.and at the time well oriented. They could see the, noble character and profound gifts of Cardinal Newman, :and yet Charles Kingsley, one of the chief antagonists of Newman, could be almost as well received. Ruskin scarcely came into his own until the succeeding period.

• One fierce outbreak of • talent the Spectator never thoroughly accepted. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hail all appeared within a year, and the Spectator was shocked by the " coarse and strange " spirit of Currer; Ellis, and-Acton Bell. The power of their writing was admitted. Of Wuthering Heights the Spectator- said : " The incidents and persons are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them." It com- plained of the " low tone of behaviour " in Jane Eyre. While the Brontes lived, the Spectator never quite revised its judgment. It came to treat the sisters with far more sympathy and respect, but even • in its most favourable remarks there was something of patronage and ,of sadness for misspent talent. THE SPLENDOUR OF THE - ywTOftIAN$; 1851--,75.

The rising of a new ,impulse in, Victorian literature was foreshadowed by the fact that in 1850 William Michael Rossetti was writing: reviews for the Spectator. The Spectator had also engrossed other new blood. In 1841 Thornton 'Hunt, the son of Leigh , Hunt, first became connected, with the. paper and for many years he was Acting Editor under Rintoul. Hunt was a man of experience and alert sympathies. He was adviser to the Daily Telegraph during the period of its great rise to power. He improved the quality of the contributors and helped to keep the Spectator abreast of the new times ; but he had by no means the forcible character of Rintoul, nor his entire devotion to the paper.

During this period Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, the Brontës, were all writing at the height *of. :their talents. Matthew Arnold, George Swinbtime, Rossetti, Meredith, Merris; "Yalter Pater, and a score of others had come to join theni. The gieat American writers, Emerson, Poe, _Walt _ Whitman, and their fellow-countrymen Longfellow, Thoreau and Mark TWain were becoming as well known, in England as in theii own country. Darwin's Origin of Species was published. Any :Englishman stood in the middle of gigantic and deep controversies. This period of English culture left its mark over the whole world ; and, indeed, the whole spirit' of the time seemed to be concentrated and explicit in England THE JOINT EDITORSHIP.

In the first ten years the Spectator underwent two changes. Rintoul died,-and for a time Thornton Hunt took over the editorship. .A more important change came when Meredith Townsend bought the paper and. offered share in it 'to T. H. Hutton. It was these two men, Townsend and Hutton, who secured for the Spectator its place in the steady and massive thought of the time.. Like many other papers of the time, it was anxious to preserve religious faith, -and at the same time to welcome the explorations of :science. Townsend's was the livelier Mind. He had a brilliant and epigrammatic style. :":It is my honest belief," wrote Mr. Strachey, " that he was, in- the matter of Style,' the greatest leader writer who has ever appealed in the English Press." But the more impressive' thinker of the two was Hutton, and we can safely _ say that he provided the staple of • the -paper's opinions. . , In Hutton's disposition there was a strain- of -pessimism which made him as impatient of easy buoyancy,, of people who took difficulties in their stride, as he was determined•in • -fighting scepticism.. Most of the great didactic Writers of his tircie,Citrlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, irritated him by the lack of subtlety in their onset upon serious problems. George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, were more to his taste ; they seemed to know more of the depths of Satan than their fellows. At the same time Hutton approved them only to reproach them ; it was exactly these writers who seemed to be wrecking by their disillusionment the cause he chiefly had at heart. From his point of view, therefore, only the Spectator held a V,fntral attitude ; only the Spectator met the challenge of scepticism with open eyes and at the same time stood firm by positive values,

DARWIN. • •

The Spectator's columns were open to the full Darwinian argument. The Origin of Species, When it first appeared, had received a review of two and a-half • columns ; a purely informative review, recounting Darwin's thesis and his evidences. Objections to the hypothesis of evolution were raised later on, but there was always a (Continued on next page.) • fair showing for the hypothesis itself. • Hutton's own view on evolution may be taken as anticipating the doctrine of Emergence. - His complaint against the scientific view was that in its common form it tended to analyse away, as coming from nowhere and being of no importance at all, qualities which exist and are of the profoundest value in our present world. It is possible, he thought, that these had historical origin ; it is even possible that man's con- sciousness appeared in the world at one particular time ; it is impossible, however, that these qualities grew, or that the process can be inverted in thought so that we treat these realities as if they did not exist.

In his insistence, therefore, on the centrality of the human being he was on the side of the angels. Professor Elton has described him as " the opponent, from a very broad theological standpoint, of the scientific and agnostic creeds which he strove judicially to understand." His discussion of the problems of the time brought the Spectator new readers and a heightened prestige. Glad- stone held that it was " one of the few papers which are written in the fear and love of God."

SWINBURNE.

In these days the Spectator had a brilliant staff of reviewers and contributors, including Walter Bagehot, John Morley, Judge Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, Sir John Lubbock, F. B. Maurice, Professors A. J. Church, Jebb, Jowett, Lecky and Jevons. In 1858-9, the veteran Leigh Hunt had contributed a rambling series of reminiscence recording the days of his radical youth and his friendships of the past. Three years later a young man of twenty-five, Algernon Charles Swinburne, began a series of contributions which spread over more than twenty years.

The Spectator had frequent quarrels with Swinburne. He could abuse it with fury and it could return his fire without compunction ; but none the less it provided him with an enthusiastic reception and a constant home for his reviews and poems.

OUR LATER VIEW OF DICKENS.

The Spectator was not yet broken in to a whole-hearted admiration for Dickens. In reviewing Bleak House it wrote :

" His power of amusing is not weakened now that the novelty of his style has passed away, nor his public wearied by the repetition of effects in which truth of nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed to mannerism and point. He must be content with the praise of amusing the idle hours of the greatest number of readers ; not, we may hope, without improvement to their hearts, but certainly without profoundly affecting their intellects or deeply stirring their emotions."

With more insight it criticised him on the score that " Dickens could never learn to draw a human being as distinct from an oddity and all his characters which are not oddities are false " ; and elaborated this view in another article.

" Mr. Dickens has, and always has had, one radical defect as a novelist—that no characteristics of men and manners take hold of his imagination with force and accuracy unless they have for him the piquancy of oddity. All his common-place characters of the middle rank are worse than poorly drawn, they are wholly unnatural—made melodramatic by an artificial emphasis placed on their sentiments, or their good nature, or their courage, or their generosity, or disinterestedness, or their selfishness, or peevishness, or some other common trait, in order to justify Mr. Dickens's imagination in writing about them. He cannot see any justification for describing average human nature as it is ;- he regards things and persons which strike him with a certain surprise, which dint themselves in his memory as moral curiosities, as the only true subjects for his art."

CARLYLE-.

It will perhaps be valuable to quote a long extract from the review of Carlyle's Life of Sterling : it shows very Clearly the Spectator's general. attitude to the great doc- trinaires of the nineteenth century. It was charitable but cautious ; it insisted continually that there must be no break with the faith of the. past. At the same time there can be no accusation of malice ; even -views which they reprobated they discussed frankly and fairly.

" For good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country ; and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us—state, church and sacred property—down along with it. But whither would he have us fly ? Is there firm land, be it ever so distant ? or is the wild waste of waters, seething, warring round as far as eye can reach, our only hope ?—the pilot-stars shining fitfully through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only guidance ? There are hearts in this land almost broken, whose traditional beliefs, serving them at least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers like him have undermined. Some betake themselves to literature, as Sterling did ; some fill up the void with the excite- ment of politics ; others feebly bemoan their irreparable loss, and wear outward seeming of universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a loftier. We have no hesitation in saying, that the language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of employing towards the religion of England and of Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have mid nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor compensation for the slightest obscuring of the hope of immortality brought to light by the gospel,' and by it conveyed to' the but of the poorest man, to awaken his crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his misery . . This life of Sterling will be useful to the class whose beliefs have given way before Mr. Carlyle's destroying energies ; because it furnishes hints, not to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the extent to which they must be prepared to go if they would really be his disciples. If the path has in its very dangers an attraction for some, while others are so strongly repelled, in either case the result is desirable, as it is thp absence of certainty which causes the pain and paralyses the power of action. At any rate, the doctrines of this teacher must be so much more intelligible to the mass when applied, as they are here, in commentary upon a life all of whose details are familiar, because it is the life of a contemporary and a countryman, that all who read must inevitably be impressed with the great lesson of the philosophic poet The intellectual power through words and things Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way.' "

NEWMAN.

The poet whom Hutton most loved was Wordsworth ; he praised him for his " keen spiritual courage and his stern spiritual frugality." Of the writers of h's own day he was most devoted to Cardinal Newman. He had the deepest admiration both for his intellect and his saint- liness. In reviewing the Apologia he re: s in a noble and just sentence to Newman's character : " A thin line of pale ascetic fire just edging the circle of his human sympathies so as to keep them in what he himself has termed a state of detachment ' from the world, and the life of the world, though without either searing their sensitiveness or limiting their range.'

When he died, Hutton wrote of him as " a white star extinguished ; and sign vanished."

RUSKIN.

Ruskin, too, met with honour, though the Spectator called him " a man of genius with a passion for insulting the intelligence of his readers." There was no sympathy with his desire to have railway stations made as ugly as possible to remind passengers of the horrors of modern civilization. But his enthusiasm, his passion for beauty, and his supple and coloured style, were fully recognized. Of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the reviewer said : " . . . few men carry their own personal peculiarities so obviously in their writing, and in few are the results to be so clearly measured by the natural capacity. Mr. Ruskin's personal qualities—his zeal, his generosity, his intense love of art—contribute powerfully to the influence which he has acquired ; make his books original, and, striking test, make them sell. His foibles come out pro- portionally ; though at the first utterance of the words we may surprise his warmest admirers by avoiding what we take to be his chief faults—deficiency of the purely reasoning faculty, and infirmity of temper."

GEORGE ELIOT.

The Spectator's darling was George Eliot. Time and again leading articles were written on her novels and she was treated with the profoundest reverence. At the same time the Editors mourned over her lack of prin- ciples. There was .also. some aloofness when they praised her for her " marvellous insight into the motives and ideas of.inferior minds." It is interesting to cast forward and remark that when Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd was published anonymously, the Spectator's reviewer attributed it to George Eliot.

This passion of the Spectator's aroused against it the anger of its contributor Swinburne ; indeed, the paper so enraged him by its implicit comparison of •George Eliot with the Brontes tlit he published a tract in whichall his powers of denunciation were showered on the Spectator.

The Spectator, in reviewing it, hit back. with vigour :.

" He is like a twaddly talker who has got hold of a good story and spoils it in the telling : he goes on the rampage and is forsaken alike by brevity and wit."

MEREDITH.

Meredith was none too gently received, Of his first volume of poems the reviewer wrote :- " Mr. Meredith has the eharacteristies of young and unstudied writers. His subjects are often too limited or common, and an attempt to impart attraction by treatment dOes not always succeed, the result being a curious quaintness rather than novelty. With the power of independent judgment and observation, Mr. Meredith falls too much into the ruts of a school, and without very closely imitating any writer in particular, frequently reminds the readers of Tennyson or Keats, with occasional touches of the Brownings ; though this manner is so common among poetical aspirants, that it. may be as much a literary fashion as an individual imitation. Mr. Meredith has occasionally, too, a sensuous warmth of image and expression, which, though not passing propriety, might as well be tempered. With the exception of want of breadth and novelty in the subjects, these things. though they may injure the style or lower the class, can hardly be said to impair the interest of - the poems. Mr. Meredith's greatest fault is overdoing ; be rarely knows when he has said enough ; besides continually over- laying his idea by explanation, he introduces similes not always of the aptest, and in addition to making them more prominent than the principal idea, runs them on till they become a new subject'. This fault would detract from the interest of any composition ; but it admits of an easy remedy. If Mr. Meredith intends to cultivate poetry, this over-exuberance must be steadily repressed."

When " Modern Love " appeared, the paper was still severer : " The jocularities are intolerably feeble and vulgar . . . The intended poetry is meretricious." This, too, drew a high retort from Swinburne :

" The business of verse-writing is hardly to express convictions, and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at -timed dealt in dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that. As to subject, it is too much to expect that all schools of poetry arc to be forever subordinate to the one just now so much in:request with us, whose scope of sight is bounded by the nursery walls ; that all muses are to bow down before her who babbles with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dangling delights of a child's coral ; and juggles with flaccid fingers one knows not whether a jester's or a baby's balls." . _ .

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Matthew Arnold was Wordsworthian, and was therefore likely to appeal to Hutton. The Spectator praised him for the precision of his verse in scattered images, and referred to his " great, though not very fertile, genius." But on the whole he was regarded as vague and unsettled: " He has been fascinated and charmed by Wordsworth's thoughts, without being truly conquered by them ; he has been diverted from his intellectual troubles by Words- worth, but has failed to. be consoled." As a critic and philosopher, the Spectator regarded him as altogether too weary in spirit, too tentative, too insecure. " He seems to us," it said, " the preacher of prineiples which, in the name of culture, may but too probably destroy the root of all true culture and in the name of religion may but too probably eat the heart out of all religion."

ROSSETTI AND MORRIS.

The artistry of Rossetti was confessed. Perhaps no poet of the time was more tenderly treated ; and when his poems first appeared, the reviewer selected for attention exactly the-poems /v.,:iyhich he -is,;Dest ;Down-, "The Blessed Damozel," "Sister Helen" and ”Jemiy.' William Morris, too, was quickly appreciated : every instalment of " The Earthly Paradise " was given a long, careful and prominent notice.

WALT WHITMAN AND HERMAN MELVILLE.

It was many years, however, before Walt Whitman became acceptable. The Spectator referred contemp- tuplisly to " the AVerage before which Walt Whitman delights to dan6e naked 'and to 'chant indecent platitudes in prose run mad."

Two very individual talents obtained a just and sensitive recognition. Of Herman Melville's Moby Dick the reviewer said :

" This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilised life, and rhapsody run mad. So far as the nautical parts are appropriate and Unmixed, the portraiture is truthful and interesting. Some of the satire, especially in the early parts, is biting and reckless. The chapter-spinning is various in character ; now powerful from the vigorous and fertile fancy of the author, now little more than empty though sounding phrases. The rhapsody belongs to wordmongering where ideas are the staple ; where it takes the shape of narrative or dramatic fiction, it is phantasmal--an attempted description of what is impossible in nature and without probability in art ; it repels the reader instead of attracting him."

CHARLES READE AND LEWIS CARROLL.

The vigour, power and delicacy of Charles Reade in The Cloister and the Hearth were immediately acclaimed " Mr. Reade's somewhat impudent genius has achieved a great: success in this book. He has shown that he carries weight well ; nay, that he is greatly the better for working up heavy material. and acknowledging the restraints of history. A rattling and unscrupulous writer—as we must call the author of harum-scarum,--- that discerning people were half inclined to doubt whether he were a man of genius or a lively charlatan, has proved in this book- that he has in him substance and breadth, that his aplomb is not Mere impertinence, that his buoyancy does not spring from heed-. lessness and conceit. Mr. Heade has shown us frequently that he could paint lively thieves and self-possessed, loquacious, fast young men, so as to draw many a smile ; but it was not till he sat down to study the manners of a past age and restore the colours of a long acted human drama of very deep human interest, that we could_ recognise the real body of intellectual energy which lies beneath his random fire."

A fervid, but short review was given to Alice in Wonder- land when it first came out. The story was described as. " exquisitely amusing." By the time Alice Through the Looking-Glass appeared, Carroll had become one of the • Spectator's chief enthusiasms :— " Children worshipped the books, luxuriating for the first time in a form of grotesquerie which they could not understand, and their elders were often amazed to field how heartily they had laughed' over stuff the charm of Which, all the while, they cOuld'not analyse. They said they laughed too, which was another triumph for Mr. Carroll, for- there are comic things—some of Cruikshank's fairy drawings, for "examplewhich men will laugh over with internal laughter, without ever fairly acknowledging their childlike enjoy- ment. The art of the two books—the consistent power with which reason is set aside, and as in dreams everything happens because it happens, and not because there was any reason why it should- happen, the thoughtful breaking of connecting links, and the more so because there is in the book so little rollic. Nonsense is generally amusing, because, besides waking up that sense of incongruity which is the cause of laughter, it suggests high spirits and devil-- may-careislmess and abandon—a state of mind, in fact, which is for a moment a relief from a too serious world ; but Mr. Carroll's writing does not suggest this mood at all, but another and much quieter one. Tickling, not horse play; is his forte, and he writes often as Lamb might have talked aloud in a dream, saying things that somehow make the reflective side of men chuckle as Lambs • wit does. Not that there is a `purpose ' in Alice's adventures, for there is none, any more than in an ordinary dream ; Mr. Carroll's. art is too good- for- that. He •relies•aametimes on mere oddities. a mere reversal of the expected sentence, but generally he produces the effect of reflection by touching an association, as, for examplc.• in introducing the Hatter, which makes the reader remember the element of absurdity in something quite familiar to his mind, like: the proverb vivified in that personage. He writes, in fact, artistic, nonsense, and is master in that high art."

[We shall continue this review of the literary pages of th2 Spectator from 1876 to the present day in our two following'.