Studies in Two Literatures

IN the past so much of the finest criticism has been J- purely the result of the occasion offered, that it is pedantic to complain of the same phenomenon in the present. The school of great critics of the beginning of the century would scarcely have made a mark but for the accident that Hazlitt and Coleridge were called upon to lecture, De Quincey and Lamb to contribute to an ephemeral journal. The formation of literary opinion is the work of coral insects. Here one builds a fragment, and there another confirms it, and these volunteers are often of more signal service than the professional historians who endeavor to follow impartially the growth of literature. Mr. Symons is of the former type; one feels that he has written largely as opportunity came to him. His subjects are fragmentary, and have been selected by others under the modification of his own fancy. This is strikingly the case with the opening section of his volume, the studies in the Elizabethan age, but it is partly true in all. The volume is a selection of what seemed most durable in the miscellaneous work of some ten or twelve years of apprenticeship to the press.

Let it be said at once that Mr. Symons bears the test of republication remarkably well. There is a solidity, a unity in his view of literary objects which gives him an advantage over almost all other critics of his particular generation. He is guided, almost obstinately, by certain principles of aesthetic judgment; he adopts the same attitude towards all literary products; he is above all entirely candid, and engaged, so far as can be perceived, in "rolling" no "log." All this combines to form an intellectual austerity, which may occasionally irritate us in a single article or review, but which, in the course of a volume which is instinct with it, has an attractive side. Mr. Arthur Symons impresses the reader by his rectitude. Whether his opinions are correct must be decided by closer inquiry; but we get that satisfaction which is given by a writer who, though quite modest in delivery, is perfectly clear about his destination and entirely certain that he knows the road. In his eloquent letter of dedication he lays down the law of his own mind, and he has an amusing phrase. Having confessed himself a firm believer in a principle which is excessively questioned, he adds, naively:— "One forgets sometimes that it has entered into the brains of men to doubt anything so obvious."

....First come seven studies on plays of Shakespeare, followed by essays on Massinger and Day. These do not appear to us to call for particular notice here. The Shakespeare essays formed part of the "Henry Irving" edition of the poet, issued and fully noticed many years ago. Mr. Symons has done well to separate these from the rest of a bulky enterprise, and they are worth preserving, although somewhat juvenile in manner and showing to some excess the influence of Mr. Swinburne. The essay on Massinger is full and competent; but Mr. Symons does not strike us as having been much interested in the subject; while that on John Day suffers from the difficulty of treating a writer whose outlines are all nebulous and vague. For instance, Mr. Symons quotes a pretty line, and says that it "bears the very sign and seal of Day." But how can we know what the sign and seal are of a dramatist four-fifths of whose works are lost, and who survives on the score of a single lyrical extravaganza of great, but probably not especially characteristic, beauty? This is the traditional way of talking about the Jacobean poets, which Mr. Swinburne, following Charles Lamb, has carried to such dangerous extremes....

—The Saturday Review