the particular history of his own language, in the collection of authors of its own department?"

These excellent and weighty words form part of an introduction to a book which, in its own department, that of pure criticism, promises to be the book of the year-Mr. George Saintsbury's "Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860" (Percival and Co.). This introduction is called "The Kinds of Criticism." It is, in itself, a short Treatise on the Art of Criticism, and it should be printed separately and placed in the hands of everyone who pretends to become a reviewer. It may be, as Mr. Andrew Lang suggests, that critics and reviewers have nothing to do with each other essentially, though accidentally the discharge of their functions may be combined in the same person. Yet even a reviewer can do himself no harm in learning the functions of a critic.

How then shall the young man become a critic? First, Mr. Saintsbury tells him, by reading; by wide and careful reading. Not that reading will make a critic, but few are the critics who can be made without it. "For my part," says the author, "I should not dare to continue criticising so much as a circulating library novel "—but there are novels and novels-a man may do worse than criticise a Meredith, and he, too, is "circulated"-" if I did not perpetually pay my respects to the classics of many literatures." In short, the critic, truly equipped, must start from a wide comparative study of different languages and literatures. This is the first principle, the only road to criticism. If we accept it, we understand at once the reason, first, why there are so few critics, and secondly, why women are seldom good critics. For the different literatures must include Greek, Latin, French, and should include German and Italian as well, not to speak of the Hebrew literature, which even Mr. Saintsbury's critic must be generally content to have in translation. Very well, thus prepared the critic "must constantly refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and disliking, in the comparative fashion.

Let Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that, with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with unrhymed. 'Compare, always compare,' is the first axiom of criticism."

After these rules follows another equally useful. "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can, that what you like and dislike is the literary, and not the extra-literary character, of the matter under examination."

And yet another. "Never be content without

VOL. I.

at least endeavouring to connect cause and effect. in some way, without giving something like a reason for the faith that is in you.'

The readers of the Author are, one and all, deeply interested in the elevation and maintenance of the standard of criticism. The literature of every age, in fact, in great measure depends upon the standard set up by the critics. Where criticism is low and ignorant of better things, unable even to appreciate effort in the true direction, the writers sink with their judges. For true criticism, a point not insisted by Mr. Saintsbury, does not destroy, but builds up: it does not deride; it instructs. Why is it, for instance, that the modern taste for the best and highest poetry is so much better than their taste for the higher work in fiction or in the drama? That it is so is proved, first by the excellent critical work on poetry, which is given to the world in the magazines of the day; next by the Browning Societies, which show, if they show nothing else, an intense and widespread love for great verse. One reason lies, one is tempted to believe, in the ineffable incompetence of the ordinary reviews of fiction. The young writer finds no instruction in the reviews which he reads. He never even looks for any; he is content if he gets off without a contemptuous jeer. He knows that he is making an essay towards a fine Art, but he has no guides; those who should lead him are dumb; they do not even understand that they have a fine Art to deal with; his judges do not know the rules of the Art; they do not know that there are any rules; nay, too often they cannot understand that there is any artistic work at all to be reviewed. As a natural consequence the great mass of the fiction put forth is without form and void. Of the ordinary criticism as applied to fiction we will perhaps speak on a future occasion. It is enough here to claim for criticism at its best its educational importance.

Mr. Saintsbury's views of the ordinary reviewer are stated with great clearness. "That a very large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is, on the whole, the most difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is, on the whole, the most lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid up for a time on the shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others-though this, I own, is scarcely credible-when the whole reviewing was farmed out to a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where the reviews were a sort of exercising ground on which novices were trained, broken down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a little gentle exercise.

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Of common mistakes on the subject which are not merely silly crazes, such as the log rolling craze and the five-pound note craze, and the like; the worst known to him, though it is shared by some who should know better, is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is always the worst, but that is about as far as my charity, informed by much experience, can go."

The present writer has also heard of newspapers when the books are all bundled off together to one man, who turns them off in little paragraphs of half-a-dozen lines each at eighteenpence a book. And yet authors and publishers are such fools as to send their books to such a paper and to expose themselves to such treatment.

For one thing, let us take comfort. Books are abused by many reviewers for many reasons. They are never abused-Mr. Saintsbury maintains-for the good things in them.

This brief resumé of a highly important and opportune paper must not be supposed to be tendered as an adequate criticism. It is tendered as an introduction and as an invitation. The former is likely to make readers of the Author uneasy on the subject of criticism-perhaps to awaken their consciences as to their own sins, because we have reviewers, if not critics among us: the latter as an invitation to get the book for themselves and to read carefully point by point what a good critic should be.

"O when shall it dawn on the night of the grave." This line, familiar to all readers of poetry, Shelley transferred bodily to the song above mentioned, where it appears as―

"Ah! when shall day dawn on the night of the grave." A new edition of Shelley's poems is daily expected, annotated by one of his ablest biographers, and it may be that this edition will contain a note on this passage, but no such note is to be found in any existing edition.

Readers of Mr. W. M. Rossetti's exhaustive memoir of Blake will doubtless remember that Milton frequently appeared in Blake's visions, and

held converse on matters celestial and terrestrial with the imaginative poet-painter. On one occasion, Blake said, speaking of these visits, "He came to ask a favour of me; said he had committed an error in 'Paradise Lost,' which he wanted me to correct in a poem or picture. But I declined; I said I had my own duties to perform." Other remarks made by Milton during these visitations have not been recorded by Blake, but a student of both poets may be forgiven for fancying that Milton would have been justified in asking Blake in what moment of forgetfulness he had written in "The Keys of the Gates of Paradise," the lines"On the shadows of the moon Climbing through night's highest noon,”

lines so closely akin to—

"To behold the wandering moon
Riding near her highest noon,"

which form one of the many beauties of "Il Penseroso "; or why, when penning "King Edward III," he had put into the mouth of his bishop the words

the arts of peace are great,

And no less glorious than those of war," thereby making him echo sentiments to be found in a celebrated sonnet addressed to the Lord General Cromwell, May, 1652, in which the writer declares that—

"Peace hath her victories No less renowned than War."* Landor occasionally complained of the manner in which his poems were treated, and certainly in one remarkable instance two brother bards attempted to beautify their work with a sea-shell stolen from his grottos; a shell which lost all its murmurous melody and glimmering beauty in their hands, and justified his remarks upon their action. But Landor was himself on one occasion a defaulter. reader of his poem "The Phocoeans," a poem published with others in 1802, will find the following lines—

"In his own image the Creator made,

His own pure sunbeam quicken'd thee, O man!
Thou breathing dial! since thy day began

The present hour was always markt with shade!"

The

* Were Landor alive, not the least delightful of his "Imaginary Conversations" would be a dialogue between these two great poets. We learn from that priceless book, Forster's Life of Landor,” that the old lion in his declining days, "picked up some of the writings of Blake, and was strangely fascinated by them," and had this conversation been added to the long list of treasures received from the same hand, the anachronism of making the dead and living poet meet would have been as justifiable as was that which was justified for all time in the poem wherein Landor made Laertes and Homer meet, and bade Homer sing once more.

and if he turns to Wordsworth's "An Evening Walk," written 1789, published 1793, he will find the same imagery—

"Alas! the idle tale of man is found
Depicted in the dial's moral round;
Hope with reflection blends her social rays

To gild the golden tablet of his days;

Yet still, the sport of some malignant power,
He knows but from its shade the present hour."

Landor's version is undeniably the finer both in composition and sentiment.

Blanco White's sonnet, "Mysterious Night," first printed in 1828, has recently been paraphrased in one of Walt Whitman's prose poems. In his "Night on the Prairies," he says—

"I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,

I was thinking the globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

And he adds after quiet contemplation of the stars"O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,

I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.” The "rawest as well as the ripest student" of English literature will at once recognise in these lines the sentiments expressed in White's solitary sonnet of which the concluding lines are

“Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst flow'r and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

In that glorious poem, Charles Wells's "Joseph and his Brethren," which owes its rescue from "the

waste-paper basket of forgetfulness," to the energetic action of Mr. Swinburne, will be found lines bearing a perilous resemblance to familiar verses by Wordsworth, viz.

"To me a simple flower is cloth'd with thoughts
That lead the mind to Heaven."

words which at once recall the concluding lines of the great "Ode

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." Wells's drama did not appear until twenty years after the publication of Wordsworth's "Ode."

At the risk of multiplying examples ad nauseam I may add that in Mr. Alfred Austin's "Tower of Babel," Act ii, scene 1, a philosopher named Sidon gives expression to sentiments closely resembling those of King Lear. The gods say Sidon deals hardly with men—

VOL I

Τ

HE primacy of Balzac in French fiction has at length been acknowledged by Englishspeaking critics. The recognition of his universal supremacy is approaching, but it seems that it will be long before his proper place as a philosopher and a seer of rare inspiration will be allowed him. It is, however, an encouraging sign that his critics agree on one point, that any attempt at general criticism of his whole work and especially review must be but the slightest sketch. Each of La Comédie Humaine, is futile, and that any new attempt confirms the opinion that we must confine ourselves to commentary alone.

It is well for us that Balzac counts among his critics some of the most eminent living writers of English. I cannot, however, consider the clever essays of Mr. Henry James and Mr. Leslie Stephen. nor yet of the gifted author of a recent article in the Quarterly, as representing him with great fidelity. Mr. W. S. Lilly unfortunately spoils an otherwise appreciative notice by a most irrelevant inquiry into Balzac's interior religion. Mr. Parsons has written a very trustworthy general review in the Atlantic Monthly, careful and accurate, and free from obtrusive originality. Mr. Thomas Hake has a trustworthy article, "A Realist at Work," in Belgravia. Of more particular articles Mr. Philip Kent's "Balzac's views of the Artistic Temperament," is excellent, and Mr. George Moore's

Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces," if a little disconnected, is interesting and enthusiastic. The criticisms which I know in English are usually to be relied on for justice of criticism, in inverse ratio to the cleverness with which they are written. It is a remarkable tribute to the breadth and depth of Balzac's intellect that his critics can always find predominant in his works those traits which they are individually disposed to notice. In this he is like the Bible, to which every sect which has arisen since the canon was formed appeals for confirmation

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of its peculiar doctrines. On these controverted points I believe his critics misrepresent him most. Mr. Leslie Stephen denies that Balzac possessed a knowledge of the human heart, on the ground that such knowledge does not exist. He considers individuality so strong in every man that it prevents a writer from embodying feeling outside his own potential experience. He explains Balzac's thousand creations as the reflection of the thousand facets of his many-sided self. On the other hand, an evident altruist writing lately in Lippincott's Magazine, considers that there is no such thing as individuality, and implies that Mr. Leslie Stephen lacked experience because he recognizes it.

The fact that Balzac has been largely introduced into England by the school which claims him as their founder-the realistic school divided between M. Zola and M. Bourget-is misleading. He is accredited with the philosophy, as well as the method, of his followers. He is deprived of one of his strongest claims to supremacy in his art, the union of idealism in conception with extraordinary realism in expression.

Sheer realism is incompatible with art; it must logically lead to the gross bad taste which disfigures M. Zola's powerful work, the monotonous vivisection of M. Bourget, or the intolerable dulness of their lesser pupils.

Literature is limited in its possible subjects; to pass these limitations is to fail as M. Zola has failed, by excess in one direction, and less gifted followers of Mr. Henry James may fail in another.

The idealist, misled by Balzac's minuteness, prejudges that his philosophy is materialistic. The realist has an evident undercurrent of distrust for the idealism which to him is antipathetic and spiritualises his master's creations. The optimist objects to La Comédie Humaine as a wicked parody of the world he reveres. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said, "We don't often catch sight in his pages of God frowning or the devil grinning; his world seems to be pretty well forgotten by the one, and its inhabitants quite able to dispense with the services of the other." The same may be said with equal truth of English society at the present time, for even if the morality of romantic fiction requires it, in actual life at least, a god has no need to advertise, and a devil is too discreet to display his tail. The immorality ascribed to Balzac is in reality that subtlest and most powerful form of morality which teaches by suggestion without didacticism. It is strange that his Christian critics should be shocked because he represents evil as apparently getting the best of the bargain of life, and the children of this world, in their generation, wiser than the children of Light. It is also strange that idealists should accuse him of realism when

the actor he so often brings to the stake is the perfect wise man. But, on the other hand, it has been more truly said that Balzac is so moral as to be sometimes untrue. In this cross fire of criticism one position has not, I think, been taken, that the object Balzac set before him was itself immoral, that a detailed history of contemporary society is a story too horrible to be told. On this point he might possibly be held to fail as a moralist. Perfect attainment of an end in view is recognized as so high an excellence in art, and Balzac has achieved so much that the morality of his aim is little questioned The historical nature of his work is accepted at the outset, but there are very few critics who do not forget it in the course of their arguments. To keep this steadily in view is essential to rendering him justice, and to obtaining a full appreciation of his marvellous work. It is noticeable that he calls the subdivisions of the scenes not "romans" or "contes," but " études." The truth of his characters has been attacked, contemporaries adverse to him confirm it, and it would not be difficult to surpass his most terrible examples of iniquity by quoting actual events occurring daily in London. It is quite true that the abnormal is not the ideal. But considering that romance deals with the less rather than the more usual event with the marriage or murder of its heroes rather than with their downsitting and uprising. And considering the greater effect that dramatic situations leave upon the mind and memory, it will be found that the proportion borne by the abnormal in La Comédie Humaine is none too great for artistic effect, and establishes no presumption that Balzac misunderstood the nature of the ideal.

There is a tendency among brilliant critics to criticise adversely separate studies of the Comédie Humaine, and to apply their criticism to the whole. In this way Balzac is censured for long and elabcrate details concerning characters of minor importance. There is truth in the censure; no doubt the artistic value of some of the studies is lessened by digressions, but it must be remembered that the minor character so minutely described in one is usually destined to be the hero of another. To appreciate this arrangement the studies should be read in their internal chronological order, beginning with "Le Martyr Calviniste," and ending with 'Comédians sans le savoir." It is impossible to criticise one study rightly without a knowledge of the rest.

To discuss the morality of Balzac in detail would require a volume. Mr. Swinburne alone, in a note to his Essay on William Blake, fully appreciates his power as a "master of morals." I believe that he exercises this power at least equally with Shakes

peare, not by interpretation, but as a pure artist by implication; this question the high authority of Mr. Swinburne has decided to the contrary.

One study by Balzac is so well known and has been so much criticised that I may perhaps notice a very common misapprehension concerning it. The blind devotion of Père Goriot is almost always regarded as ignoble, and Père Goriot as a libel on the heroic character of King Lear. But the short account of his life before the drama begins, gives a clue not sufficiently considered. Père Goriot is a man of vile character; he has practised the most despicable trade; he has grown rich by usurious corn-dealing in time of famine. He has fattened

on the starvation of the poor. He is not a Jew spoiling the Egyptians, but a Frenchman of the people preying on the keen hunger of his own brothers. He has no religion, no education, no morality. But in him is one-instinct perhapsnot wholly evil, his utter devotion to his daughters. (If this had been Shakespeare's work this point would long ago have been seized on and belauded as 66 a touch of nature" of extraordinary beauty.) Le Père Goriot's nature is too contracted, too frozen into its separate cells by long habit, for the good to leaven it perceptibly. He is a low type of nature incapable of rising (as all nature is incapable) above its own sphere, but the one good quality does raise him to the extreme bounds of his sphere, and he dies by so cruel a martyrdom that we are ready to forget his infamous greed. He is a character with one talent, and he uses it. Père Goriot is not likely to attract the optimist; however, there is nature and idealism in the sketch of him all the same.

A certain "snobbishness" and want of taste has been charged against Balzac, because his leaders of society are guilty of impertinences and want of refined feeling. The usually adverse Sainte Beuve testifies that these characters are extraordinarily like contemporary life at the time, and then Balzac does not necessarily approve of what he describes. In many of the cases specially noticed, his critics are deceived by his power of concealment. It is to fall into the error of which he is accused, to imagine that perfection in etiquette or a prominent position in society ensure perfect gentleness of mind.

Lastly, the monarchism and Catholicism of Balzac are said to be mere affectations. Passages are quoted to prove this. The Abbé, tutor to de Marsay in "Ferragus," is even regarded as a type of Balzac's priest. Even that most brilliant and convincing of critics, Mr. Henry James, cannot make us consider this quite fair. Balzac has explicitly declared that he wrote as a monarchist and a Catholic. There are strong expressions of

reverence in his writing for both the throne and the Church; no word is found disrespectful to religion or the family. If the philosophy of Louis Lambert is incompatible with Christian Philosophy, which I am not prepared to maintain, it is purely speculative, and has not the evidential value of distinct purpose.

As a race devoted to licence in politics and religion, we may regret the lack of it in so comprehensive a mind as Balzac's; but by isolating passages in his writing and reading in our own meanings at variance with his expressed purpose, we shall neither do justice to their artistic merit nor arrive at a true knowledge of their philosophy. WILLIAM WILSON.

TARSTOW, DENVER AND COMPANY, LIMITED.

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HE author is getting on. Here we have before us the most practical realisation of our statements that literary property is real, and should meet with the same business-like treatment that other forms of property meet with as a matter of course. For is not Tarstow, Denver and Company, Limited, a business-like affair with a business-like prospectus, and a capital of £10,000 to be divided in orthodox manner into Deferred, Preferred, and Founders' Shares, and are not its objects the publication of the works of one novelist and the arrangement of a literary syndicate for the supply to newspapers and magazines of novels and other material ?

When we look back upon our own earlier circulars and remember how hopeless, in days gone by, it would have seemed to us to attempt to persuade anyone that there might be as much money in a good novel as in a good pill, and that the business treatment of each might, with advantage, be made` more similar; when we recall our own interest in a syndicate for the supply of newspapers, and our own idea-still present to us-of some profitsharing scheme for the benefit of our members, it seems almost cantankerous to reflect upon Tarstow, Denver and Company, Limited, in terms of anything short of praise.

Yet, from the perusal of the prospectus, we are constrained to prophesy badly for the future of this

concern.

The following are the chief advantages offered to the shareholders :

(1) The copyrights of the "J.E.M." guidebooks.

(2) The profits of a syndicate for the supply of novels and other literary matter by well