HISTORY. LITERARY CRITICISM 1171 satisfied nobody, it was rightly read by everybody. For it is well written, reverent and thoughtful, and more satisfactory from every point of view than its sequel, Natural Religion. Seeley's best historical work is to be sought in the invigorating Expansion of England (1883) and the Growth of British Policy (1895), which are animated by a genuine patriotism and infused with a vital faith in the destinies of the British Empire. Sir Charles Dilke (1843-1911) also brought a considerable mass of learning to his Problems of Greater Britain (1890); his knowledge of practical foreign politics was unrivalled, and his point of view is both an enlargement and corrective of Seeley's. Lord Acton (1834-1905), to whose initiative the Cambridge Modern History is due, was perhaps the most learned historian of his time; and the fruit of his learning, all too scanty, shows that he had a fine feeling for the moral questions of history. Frederic W. Maitland (1850-1906) has written chiefly upon the history of law; but in spite of the highly technical nature of his subject, its style raises it into literature. Roman Canon Law in the Church of England (1898) is a masterpiece of erudition and foresight. Other writers on history who must not be overlooked are J. Cotter Morison (1831-88), author of the readable and independent Service of Man (1887), as well as an excellent monograph on Gibbon (1878); Goldwin Smith (1824-1910), a remarkably vigorous writer who has held professorships at Oxford and Toronto, and has written much about current topics; and Frederic Harrison (1831- ), an active apostle of Positivism, who has written an admirable life of Cromwell (1888), as well as on William the Silent; his interests lie in the ethical aspects of history and in the application of his principles to current events. His Choice of Books (1886) and Realities and Ideals (1908) are characteristically serious and valuable volumes. 36. The development of literature has also attracted the attention of many able writers, of whom we may mention Stopford Brooke (1832- ), who has dealt in an interesting manner with early English literature, and has written with scholarly sympathy on Tennyson, Browning and other poets; Professor George Saintsbury (1845- ), who combines full knowledge and immense diligence with an irritating and dogmatic literary style, and is invaluable to the student for his History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900-4) ; William J. Courthope (1842- ), whose History of English Poetry (1895-1909) is the standard modern work on the subject; Edmund Gosse (1849- ), a poet and critic, as well as the historian of the literature of the eighteenth century; Richard Garnett (1835-1906), another accomplished poet and critic, as well as a biographer and the historian of Italian literature; and Henry Morley (1822-94), the modest author of the first part of this volume, whose life's work on the English Writers (1864-95) had only reached the age of Shakespeare when he died. Useful studies in certain parts of literature must be associated with the names of William Minto, George Birkbeck Hill, Andrew C. Bradley, Austin Dobson, and Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford and the author of two delightful little books on The English Novel (1894) and Shakespeare (1907) respectively. These studies lead naturally to those writers who have been distinguished especially as critics, and these are no less numerous and meritorious. We have an able and learned critic in Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and author of the very delightful Hours in a Library (1874-9). Stephen was a student and an admirer of the intellectual eighteenth century; his writings are all couched in a judicial and critical spirit; but they have an unimpassioned and lucid style, as well as a fund of well-mastered knowledge, which makes them a pleasure to read. No man could write a literary biography with more judgment and acceptance. He was an agnostic, and defended the rationalist position in several volumes, of which An Agnostic's Apology (1893) is the best known. The book in which his literary tastes and rationalist principles came into happiest combination was his English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876). Richard Holt Hutton (1826-1907), for a long time editor of The Spectator, was a critic of another school and raised the journalism of literature on to a high plane. Most of his writing was of an occasional and ephemeral type, but his essays on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (1894) and those on Modern Guides in Matters of Faith are the work of a refined, religious nature, sane, scholarly and well-written. Other able men of letters who have accomplished some excellent criticism are Henry D. Traill (1842-1900), to be remembered best by the cultured satire of The New Lucian (1884); Canon Alfred Ainger (1837-1904), lover of Charles Lamb and biographer LITERARY CRITICISM 1173 of Crabbe; J. Churton Collins (1848-1908), a finished scholar, editor, and stimulating critic, than whom no man did more to uphold the highest standards in literature; Sir Sidney Colvin (1845- ), editor of the letters of Keats and Stevenson, and an accomplished art critic; Andrew Lang (1844-1912), a voluminous and versatile writer who has distinguished himself as translator of Homer, as historian of Scotland, as an editor of fairy-tales, as an authority on totems and on other anthropological matters, as a biographer and as a critic; and among recent writers of distinction, Arthur Symons, Stephen Gwynn, and Clement Shorter may be added to their older contemporaries as lovers of literature who have a pleasant faculty of criticism, while the drama claims the acute minds of Arthur B. Walkley (1855- ) and William Archer (1856- ), the latter being better known, perhaps, by his vigorous translations of Ibsen than by his trenchant and riddling dramatic critiques. Of all these critics it is only just to say that they deal with books or plays in the right spirit, seeking to discover their true value in the light of the permanent principles of literature, as they see them. Their opinions are as varied as the books they criticise; some are guided overmuch by romantic principles, just as others pin their motto to the classical traditions; some boast their ultra-modernity, while others have naught but anathema for the workings of the modern spirit. One critic finds literature the essence of life and takes it thus seriously; to another, literature is but a delightful meadow to browse and bask in. Thus the critics have not been strong enough or united enough to do again what Matthew Arnold did; there is too much criticism, and no worthy literary ideal guides its working or makes it serve as a trustworthy finger-post to the national treasures. Especially in the treatment of current literature do we find it unsatisfactory and unreliable. 37. The one critic who has made his criticism creative, and converted the occasional study into a piece of real literature, is Walter H. Pater (1839-94), an Oxford tutor whose works are a practical sermon on the dogma of "Art for Art's sake." Pater looked at life through college windows, which means that he never came into sharp contact with it at all. He was a recluse, and a man of books; yet he is the prophet of the aesthetic school of criticism. Literary art was his life's aim; and in a series of books, quietly and carefully wrought out, he has shown us what art can do when it turns in upon itself. The result is what we should expect. Pater's brilliantly-coloured and exquisitely modulated prose is redolent of the hothouse: it cannot endure the rough east winds of everyday use. Pater's world is artificial, and its products begin to decay as soon as they are brought into the open. He wooed his mistress Art with sacred self-abnegation; he gave up all for the quest of beauty; he attained-and only shows us in spite of himself that epicurism is not able to stand alone as a philosophy of life. His first important work was Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and some of his most characteristic writing is in that volume. His study of Leonardo da Vinci is one of his finest pieces, and admirably illustrates his general point of view. Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his most ambitious work; it is a monument of pure literary art, noble in tone deeply religious in spirit, learned, and the revelation of a personality which is, in all its essentials, Pater's own. Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations (1889), and Greek Studies (1895) are as full of insight as of fine writing; while Plato and Platonism (1893) is an admirable introduction to the spirit of Greek philosophy. Nothing that Pater wrote ought to fall into oblivion; and if it can arouse enthusiasm only in certain exclusive coteries, it must be placed along with Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism as the finest critical work of the latter part of the Victorian era. The study of the Renaissance is the staple commodity in the literary fame of John Addington Symonds (184093), who was full of knowledge concerning the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance, and has left us the authoritative volume on this theme. Like Pater, he was essentially a literary artist; but, while always writing well, he lacked Pater's greater creative power. His pleasant little essay on Shelley in the "English Men of Letters" series deserves to be remembered. The seed of decadence that lies inherent in the theories of the æsthetic critics produced its natural flower in the wayward affectations of the gifted Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The brilliant wit and consummate art which went to the creation of such a trifle as Lady Windermere's Fan (1893) cannot be matched elsewhere in literature. But art without sincerity, and divorced from morals, is not the mistress whom Ruskin and Pater served. And until his imprisonment in Reading gaol, SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS 1175 Wilde's art was merely that of an immoral trifler with life. But The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis (1905) are human documents profound in their pathos; Wilde's nature passed from the careless airy sunshine of brilliant artificiality into unutterable deeps of spiritual agony; and his death alone prevented us from seeing him emerge into a higher life. The cult of sensuous beauty would have passed through the valley of sorrows into the service of humanity; and what so gifted a man might have accomplished is to-day matter only for speculation. 38. We have now but to recall to the student's mind the wide area of book production in which literary distinction is not the first thing aimed at, in which, indeed, creative literature has no place properly so called. Yet the writings of great scholars, divines, philosophers and men of science occasionally become literature in spite of themselves; and much more frequently exert very great influence on the literature of later times. Who can doubt, for example, the value of the work of such a pioneer as Frederick J. Furnivall (1825-1911), who has done so much to bring Early and Middle English literature to the notice of scholars or students? To him must be added the editors of the New English Dictionary, even if we can omit the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (1835- ) and other students of the philology of our language. Such editors as Edward Arber (1836- ), who has brought so many rare books into our ken through his cheap English Reprints; as James Spedding (1808-81), the editor of Bacon; as Sir Edward T. Cook (1857- ), the final editor of Ruskin's works; and many others, have surely rendered to literature invaluable service. Sir John Rhys (1840- ) has in such volumes as Celtic Heathendom (1886) done no less than did Lady Charlotte Guest in her Mabinogion (1849) to bring the Welsh Celts before us. And in the realm of classical scholarship we have, by the side of such masterly editorial work as the Lucretius of H. A. J. Munro (1819-85) and the Sophocles of Sir Richard Jebb (1841-1905), a sheaf of valuable translations, of which we can only mention the Virgil of John Conington (1825-69), the prose version of the Æneid by Prof. J. W. Mackail, the Odyssey of Butcher and Lang, and the very interesting renderings of Greek plays by Gilbert Murray (1866). Professor Mackail (1859a splendid little study of Latin Literature ) has also written (1895) and a sym |