It is

NATURAL and becoming as it is to think modestly of the literary achievements of our own time, in comparison with certain periods of our past literary history, it may yet be asserted with some confidence that in no age has there been so large an amount of real ability engaged in the conduct of British literature as at present. Whether our topmost men are equal in stature to the giants of some former generations, and whether the passing age is depositing on the shelf of our rare national classics masterpieces of matter and of form worthy to rank with those already there, are questions which need not be discussed in connexion with our statement. enough to remember that, for the three hundred publications or so which annually issued from the British press about the middle of the seventeenth century, we now produce every year some five thousand publications of all sorts, and, probing this fleeting mass of contemporary authorship as far round us and in as many directions as we can, in order to appraise its contents, to see, as I believe we should see, that the prodigious increase of quantity has been accompanied by no deterioration of average quality. Lamentations are indeed common over the increase of books in the world. This, it is said, is the Mudiaval era. Do not these lamentations proceed, however, on a false view of literature, as if its due limits at any time were to be No. 7.-VOL. II.

measured by such a petty standard as the faculty of any one man to keep up with it as a reader, or even to survey it as a critic? There is surely a larger view of literature than this-according to which the expression of passing thought in preservable forms is one of the growing functions of the race; so that, as the world goes on, more and ever more of what is remembered, reasoned, imagined, or desired on its surface, must necessarily be booked or otherwise registered for momentary needs and uses, and for farther action, over long arcs of time, upon the spirit of the future. According to this view, the notion of the perseverance of our earth on its voyage ages hereafter with a freight of books increased, by successive additions, incalculably beyond that which already seems an overweight, loses much of its discomfort; nay, in this very vision of our earth as it shall be, carrying at length so huge a registration of all that has transpired upon it, have we not a kind of pledge that the registration shall not have been invain, and that, whatever catastrophe may await our orb in the farther chances of being, the lore it has accumulated shall not perish, but shall survive or detach itself, a heritage beyond the shipwreck? In plainer argument; although in the immense diffusion of literary capability in these days, there may be causes tending to lower the

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highest individual efforts, is not the diffusion itself a gain, and is it after all consistent with fact that the supposed causes are producing the alleged effect? That there is a law of vicissitude in the intellectual power of a nation; that, as there are years of good crop and years of bad crop in the vegetable world, so there are ages in a nation's life of superexcellent nerve and faculty, and again ages intellectually feeble, seems as satisfactory a generalization as any of the rough historical generalizations we yet have in stock; but that this law of vicissitude implies diminished capacity in the highest individuals according as the crowd increases, does not appear. The present era of British literature, counting from the year 1789, is as rich, as brilliant with lustrous names, as any since the Elizabethan era and its continuation, from 1580 to 1660; nay, if we strike out from the Elizabethan firmament its majestic twin-luminaries, Shakespeare and Bacon, our firmament is the more brilliantly studded -studded with the larger stars. Nothing but a morose spirit of disregard for what is round us, or an excess of the commendable spirit of affection for the past, or, lastly, an utter ignorance of the actual books of the past which we do praise, prevents us from seeing that many of the poets and other authors even of the great Elizabethan age, who retain their places in our collections, or that, still more decidedly, many of the celebrities of that later age which is spanned by Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," were but poetasters and poor creatures, compared with relative authors of the last seventy years. Test the matter roughly in what is called our current literature. What an everlasting fuss we do make about Junius and his letters! And yet there is no competent person but will admit that these letters will not stand a comparison, in any respect of real in tellectual merit, with many of the leading articles which are written overnight at present by contributors to our daily newspapers, and skimmed by us at breakfast next morning.

It is, therefore, in no spirit of depre

ciation towards our current literature, that we venture to point out certain of its wide-spread vices. The vices which we select are not those which might turn out to be the deepest and most radical; they are simply those that cannot fail to catch the eye from the extent of surface which they cover.

1. There is the vice of the Slip-shod or Slovenly. In popular language it may be described as the vice of bad workmanship. workmanship. Its forms are various. The lowest is that of bad syntax, of lax concatenation of clauses and sentences. It would be easy to point out faults of this kind which reappear in shoals in each day's supply of printed matterfrom the verbs misnominatived, and the clumsy "whiches" looking back ruefully for submerged antecedents, so common in the columns of our hasty writers, up to the unnecessarily repeated "that" after a conditional clause which some writers insert with an infatuated punctuality, and even the best insert occasionally. Should the notice of a matter so merely mechanical seem too trivial, there is, next, that form of the slip-shod which consists in stuffing out sentences with certain tags and shreds of phraseology lying vague about society, as bits of undistributed type may lie about a printing-room. "We are free to confess," "we candidly acknowledge," "will well repay perusal," "we should heartily rejoice," "did space permit," 66 causes beyond our control," "if we may be allowed the expression,"

commence hostilities"-what are these and a hundred other such phrases but undistributed bits of old speech, like the "electric fluid" and the "launched into eternity" of the penny-a-liners, which all of us are glad to clutch, to fill a gap, or to save the trouble of composing equivalents from the letters? To change the figure (see, I am at it myself!), what are such phrases but a kind of rhetorical putty with which cracks in the sense are stopped, and prolongations formed where the sense has broken short? Of this kind of slipshod in writing no writers are more guilty than those who have formed their

style chiefly by public speaking; and it is in them also that the kindred faults of synonyms strung together and of redundant expletives are most commonly seen. Perhaps, indeed, the choicest specimens of continuous slip-shod in the language are furnished by the writings of celebrated orators. How dilute the tincture, what bagginess of phraseology round what slender shanks of meaning, what absence of trained muscle, how seldom the nail is hit on the head! It is not every day that a Burke presents himself, whose every sentence is charged with an exact thought proportioned to it, whether he stands on the floor and speaks, or takes his pen in hand. And then, not only in the writings of men rendered diffuse by much speaking after a low standard, but in the tide of current writing besides, who shall take account of the daily abundance of that more startling form of slip-shod which rhetoricians call Confusion of Metaphor? Lord Castlereagh's famous "I will not now enter upon the fundamental feature upon which this question hinges," is as nothing compared with much that passes daily under our eyes in the pages of popular books and periodicals-tissues of words in which shreds from nature's four quarters are jumbled together as in heraldry; in which the writer begins with a lion, but finds it in the next clause to be a waterspout; in which icebergs swim in seas of lava, comets collect taxes, pigs sing, peacocks wear silks, and teapots climb trees.

Pshaw! technicalities all the mere minutia of the grammarian and the critic of expression! Nothing of the kind, good reader! Words are made up of letters, sentences of words, all that is written or spoken of sentences succeeding each other or interflowing; and at no time, from Homer's till this, has anything passed as good literature which has not satisfied men as tolerably tight and close-grained in these particulars, or become classic and permanent which has not, in respect of them, stood the test of the microscope. We distinguish, indeed, usefully enough, between matter and expression, between

thought and style; but no one has ever attended to the subject analytically without becoming aware that the distinction is not ultimate-that what is called style resolves itself, after all, into manner of thinking; nay, perhaps (though to show this would take some time) into the successive particles of the matter thought. If a writer is said to be fond of epithets, it is because he has a habit of always thinking a quality very prominently along with an object; if his style is said to be figurative, it is because he thinks by means of comparisons; if his syntax abounds in inversions, it is because he thinks the cart before he thinks the horse. And so, by extension, all the forms of slip-shod in expression are, in reality, forms of slip-shod in thought. If the syntax halts, it is because the thread of the thought has snapped, or become entangled. If the phraseology of a writer is diffuse; if his language does not lie close round his real meaning, but widens out in flat expanses, with here and there a tremor as the meaning rises to take breath; if in every sentence we recognise shreds and tags of common social verbiage-in such a case it is because the mind of the writer is not doing its duty, is not consecutively active, maintains no continued hold of its object, hardly knows its own drift. In like manner, mixed or incoherent metaphor arises from incoherent conception, inability to see vividly what is professedly looked at. All forms of slip-shod, in short, are to be referred to deficiency of precision in the conduct of thought. Of every writer it ought to be required at least that he pass every jot and tittle of what he sets down through his mind, to receive the guarantee of having been really there, and that he arrange and connect his thoughts in a workmanlike manner. Anything short of this is allowance being made for circumstances which may prevent a conscientious man from always doing his best-an insult to the public. Accordingly, in all good literature, not excepting the subtlest and most exuberant poetry, one perceives a strict logic linking thought with thought. The velocity

with which the mind can perform this service of giving adequate arrangement to its thoughts, differs much in different

cases.

With some writers it is done almost unconsciously-as if by the operation of a logical instinct so powerful that whatever teems up in their minds is marshalled and made exact as it comes, and there is perfection in the swiftest expression. So it was with the all-fluent Shakespeare, whose inventions, boundless and multitudinous, were yet ruled by a logic so resistless, that they came exquisite at once to the pen's point, and in studying whose intellectual gait we are reminded of the description of the Athenians in Euripides "those sons of Erectheus always

moving with graceful step through a "glittering violet ether, where the nine "Pierian muses are said to have brought "up yellow-haired Harmony as their com'mon child." With others of our great writers it has been notably different rejection of first thoughts and expressions, the slow choice of a fit per-centage, and the concatenation of these with labour and care.

Prevalent as slip-shod is, it is not so prevalent as it was. There is more careful writing, in proportion, now than there was thirty, seventy, or a hundred years ago. This may be seen on comparing specimens of our present literature with corresponding specimens from the older newspapers and periodicals. The precept and the example of Wordsworth and those who helped him to initiate that era of our literature which dates from the French Revolution, have gradually introduced, among other things, habits of mechanical carefulness, both in prose and in

verse.

Among poets, Scott and Byron -safe in their greatness otherwisewere the most conspicuous sinners against the Wordsworthian ordinances in this respect after they had been promulgated. If one were willing to risk being stoned for speaking truth, one might call these two poets the last of the great slip-shods. The great slipshods, be it observed; and, if there were the prospect that, by keeping silence

about slip-shod, we should see any other such massive figure heaving in among us in his slippers, who is there that would object to his company on account of them, or that would not gladly assist to fell a score of the delicates with polished boot-tips in order to make room for him? At the least, it may be said that there are many passages in the poems of Scott and Byron which fall far short of the standard of carefulness already fixed when they wrote. Subsequent writers, with nothing of their genius, have been much more careful. There is, however, one form of the slip-shod in verse which, probably because it has not been recognised as slipshod, still holds ground among us. It consists in that particular relic of the "poetic diction" of the last century which allows merely mechanical inversions of syntax for the sake of metre and rhyme. For example, in a poem recently published, understood to be the work of a celebrated writer, and altogether as finished a specimen of metrical rhetoric and ringing epigram as has appeared for many a day, there occur such passages as these :

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Harley's gilt coach the equal pair attends."

"What earlier school this grand comedian rear'd?

His first essays no crowds less courtly cheer'd.

From learned closets came a sauntering sage,

Yawn'd, smiled, and spoke, and took by storm the age."

"All their lore Illumes one end for which strives all their will;

Before their age they march invincible."

"That talk which art as eloquence admits

Must be the talk of thinkers and of wits."

"Let Bright responsible for England be,

And straight in Bright a Chatham we should see."

"All most brave In his mix d nature seem'd to life to start, When English honour roused his English heart."

As,

That such instances of syntax inverted to the mechanical order of the verse should occur in such a quarter, proves that they are still considered legitimate. But I believe-and this notwithstanding that ample precedent may be shown, not only from poets of the last century, but from all preceding poets-that they are not legitimate. Verse does not cancel any of the conditions of good prose, but only superadds new and more exquisite conditions; and that is the best verse where the words follow each other punctually in the most exact prose order, and yet the exquisite difference by which verse does distinguish itself from prose is fully felt. within prose itself, there are natural inversions according as the thought moves on from the calm and straightforward to the complex and impassioned -as what would be in one mood "Diana of the Ephesians is great," becomes in another, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"-so, it may be, there is a farther amount of inversion proper within verse as such. Any such amount of inversion, however, must be able to plead itself natural-that is, belonging inevitably to what is new in the movement of the thought under the law of verse; which plea would not extend to cases like those specified, where versifiers, that they may keep their metre or hit a rhyme, tug words arbitrarily out of their prose connexion. If it should be asked how, under so hard a restriction, a poet could write verse at all, the answer is, "That is his difficulty." But that this canon of taste in verse is not so oppressive as it looks, and that it will more and more come to be recognised and obeyed, seems augured in the fact that the greatest British poet of our time has himself intuitively attended to it, and furnished an almost continuous example of it in his poetry. Repeat any even of Tennyson's lyrics,

where, from the nature of the case, obedience to the canon would seem most difficult-his "Tears, idle tears," or "The splendour falls," and see if, under all that peculiarity which makes the effect of these pieces, if of any in our language, something more than the effect of prose, every word does not fall into its place, like fitted jasper, exactly in the prose order. So and what do you say to Mr. Tennyson's last volume, with its repetition of the phrase "The Table Round"? Why, I say that, when difficulty mounts to impossibility, then even the gods relent, even Rhadamanthus yields. Here it is as if the British nation had passed a special enactment to this effect :-" Whereas "Mr. Tennyson has written a set of poems on the Round Table of Arthur "and his Knights, and whereas he has represented to us that the phrase "The Round Table,' specifying the "central object about which these poems "revolve, is a phrase which no force "of art can work pleasingly into Iambic verse, we, the British nation, considering the peculiarity of the case, "and the public benefits likely to "accrue from a steady contemplation of "the said object, do enact and decree "that we will in this instance depart "from our usual practice of thinking "the species first and then the genus, "and will, in accordance with the "practice of other times and nations,

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sayThe Table Round' instead of "The Round Table' as heretofore." But this is altogether a special enactment.

2. There is the vice of the Trite. Here, at length, we get out of the region of mere verbal forms, and gaze abroad over the wide field of our literature, with a view everywhere to its component substance. We are overrun with the Trite. There is Trite to the right hand, and Trite to the left; Trite before and Trite behind; the view is of vast leagues of the Trite, inclosing little oases of true literature, as far as the eye can reach. And what is the Trite? is a minor variety of what is known as Cant. By Cant is meant the repetition,

It