finds it worth his while to draw upon. Familiar as we all profess to be with the great fact that human nature remains the same always through all the varying modes of its expression, it might still astonish, and might possibly even humiliate, the triumphant young geniuses of our day to find how much in common they have with their fathers who bore them. Grub Street is pulled down; its place knoweth it no more; but though on an ampler stage, and by players more resplendently bedizened, the mixed drama of comedy and tragedy that went on behind those dingy walls goes on still. It is to these papers that we must turn to find Johnson at his best. When satirizing, never malicious even when most painfully true, the vagaries of authors, or of their natural enemies, the critics, he is on his own ground. Different as the manner would have been, Addison himself could hardly have bettered the Account of an Author travelling in Quest of his own Fame,' or 'The Author's Art of praising Himself.' And he is never, we say again, malicious, as Pope was: he makes no universal war on Grub Street. He never laughs at the ignorant or the dull merely for their ignorance or dulness. It is against vanity and presumption and affectation and insincerity that his pen is pointed, and even then more, as the phrase goes, in sorrow than in anger.

in despair of a fit paraphrase, we have made free to borrow the title) has so happily styled the Terrific Diction? "There are men who seem to think nothing so much the characteristic of a genius as to do common things in an uncommon manner; like Hudibras, to tell the clock by algebra; or, like the lady in Dr. Young's satires, to drink tea by stratagem; to quit the beaten track only because it is known, and take a new path, however crooked or rough, because the straight was found out before." With such a text he would be a dull dog indeed who could not find matter for a sermon to-day!

Very few of our readers probably have a copy of the Idler' on their shelves: not many more, we suspect, are likely to be at the pains of procuring one at our recommendation. We shall save, therefore, much time and trouble (which all are surely ready to save on any terms) by attempting some small exposition of the purpose of this most pertinent essay.

After starting with the tolerably evident assumption that the nearest way to truth is the best, the teacher goes on to say: "Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible." Then are shortly classified some of the species of authors whose "labours counteract themselves." There is "the man of exuberance and copiousness, who diffuses every thought through so many diversities of expression, that it is lost like water in a mist; there is "the liberal illustrator, who shows by examples and comparisons what was clearly seen when it was first proposed"; and "the stately son of demonstration, who proves with mathe

matical formality what no man has yet pretended to doubt." Lastly comes the author of a style which has for its first purpose to disguise evident truths in such a way "that a man will as easily mistake his own positions, if he meets them thus transformed, as he may pass in a masquerade his nearest acquaintance." This particular style of writing is more explicitly described. "It may be called the terrific, for its chief intention is to terrify and amaze; it may be termed the repulsive, for its natural effect is to drive away the reader; or it may be distinguished, in plain English, by the denomination of the bugbear style, for it has more terror than danger, and will appear less formidable as it is more nearly approached." Then follow some samples of this sort of eloquence from a book then lately published, 'Letters on Mind,' by a writer whose name survives only in a foot-note. To offer

any of these to our readers would be indeed to send owls as wonders to Athens. But the conclusion of it all deserves to be quoted. "This, my dear reader, is very strange: but though it be strange, it is not new: survey these wonderful sentences again, and they will be found to contain nothing more than very plain truths, which, till this author arose, had always been delivered in plain language."

One would not, as we have said, have to cast about very far to find in our current literature examples in abun dance of the various styles. Illustrious examples, indeed, of nearly all of them have lately been provided by a writer who, many as the ways are in which he has distinguished himself, has not yet chosen to distinguish himself by discovering the nearest way to truth. Above all writers of his day Mr. Swinburne has been pre-eminently "the man of exuberance and copiousness; and above all the volumes that he has published, in prose and verse, his last perhaps displays those qualities in their richest profusion.1

The volume is for the most part

1 'Miscellanies,' by Algernon Charles Swinburne. London, 1886.

made up (as so many now are, more's the pity) of various critical disquisitions that have been aired before in sundry quarters where such things abound. Nothing Mr. Swinburne has written has ever missed the public ear, or could miss it: one may disagree with him, but one must hear him. These articles are sure to have been read at first hand by all who care for that sort of writing, and some of them, at least, have been freely discussed, both then and since. It is not, therefore, our intention to repeat an already more than twice-told tale; to deprecate Mr. Swinburne's contempt for Byron or to re-echo his praise of Wordsworth; to follow him through the dark unsavoury maze in which all must lose themselves who still wish to verify the guilt or the innocence of Mary Stuart; or to take a seat on the bench beside him as he sums up on the rival claims of Lord Tennyson and De Musset. To criticise Mr. Swinburne's criticisms is hardly, indeed, one man's work. No two living men can have read so much and so widely. And then, his qualities as a critic are so well known. His likes, so cordial and so catholic; his dislikes, equally catholic and even more cordial; his unrivalled command of language; his wonderful keenness of vision alternated with an obliquity more wonderful still. Every quality that a critic should have is his, and mixed with each, alas! is something of every quality a critic should not have. To borrow a metaphor from his own poetry, readers who essay to follow him through the perilous paths of his critical wanderings are like those "weak ships and spirits" in his 'Garden of Proserpine;

They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither.

No attempt, then, will here be made to examine any of the critical judgments expressed in this volume; but from it we shall venture to take an illustration or two of a phase of the Terrific Diction not included in Johnson's category, by the use of which

Mr. Swinburne does more to counteract himself than any other writer of our time. It is not (again to borrow his own words) "the positive worth and actual weight of his message" that we propose to consider so much as "the method of its delivery."

The power of judging himself is one of the rarest and most precious possessions of a writer: the possession of this power in a very remarkable degree (as all who have read his letters will know) was, for example, one of the most striking of the many striking gifts of Keats. What is less rare, less precious, yet perhaps even more curious, is the power of unconsciously seeing oneself in others; and of all the conspicuous writers of our time none have possessed this power so vividly as Carlyle and Mr. Swinburne. A little thought will enable any one at all conversant with his writings to recall many instances of it in the case of the former; in the case of the latter there is more than one signal instance of it in the present volume.

In the paper on Charles Reade Mr. Swinburne touches on what Trollope, with happy euphemism, has styled Reade's amazing misconception of the duty of literary honesty, a misconcep tion which Mr. Swinburne thinks likely to prove more injurious to Reade's fame than his "unhappy and ludicrous habit of sputtering at any objection taken to any part or feature of his work, of yelling and foaming at any reflection cast on any one who had the fortune or misfortune of his friendship or acquaintance." No one, he says, could suppose that Reade's pilferings were due to the "necessity of conscious incompetence"; but, he goes

on,

"This does not improve either the morality or the comprehensibility of his position; nor does it justify, however fully it may explain, the rabid virulence of his on those who differed from his theory or objected to his practice. Strength and plainness of speech are thoroughly commendable only when the application of plain terms and strong epithets is so manifestly just that no man of common honesty and candour will question its justice or its

necessity. To insist on calling a spade a toothpick is not more foolish than to insist on calling a toothpick a spade. All effect is destroyed, all force is withdrawn from the strongest phrases in the language, when a critic who merely objects to the method or impugns the conclusions of an author is assailed in such terms as would be simply proper and requisite to define the character of a detractor who skulks aside or sneaks away from responsibility for words which he might be called upon, by the force of general opinion or the law of literary honour, at once to swallow or to prove."

And then, in the very next paragraph, Mr. Swinburne proceeds to call a toothpick a spade in terms which he himself has been obliging enough to define—

"A brainless and frontless trafficker in scandal, a secret and scurrilous traducer who strews insult and scatters defamation in the holes and corners of crepuscular and furtive literature, behind the backs of men who have met with equally contemptuous indifference his previous advances and his previous impertinences, must, if he be a responsible creature, know himself to be, in the eyes of any one with any pretension to honour, a person of such unspeakably infamous character that every foul word or insolent allusion which in conscious security from all chance of reprisals he may venture to cast at his superiors does but more loudly proclaim him a liar and a slanderer, a coward and a cur. Such an one is, in homely English, by common consent a blackguard; and a blackguard who invites and challenges the chastisement of exposure is not less indisputably a blockhead."

A little of yelling and foaming here, surely but, no— : "These, in such a case, are terms of scientific definition rather than of individual obloquy." There is but one parallel that we know of to this remarkable statement. In one of John Leech's immortal drawings, a small Special Constable during the Chartist Riots of '48 is represented saying to some burly affian preparing for action: "Now, if I kill you it's nothing, but if you kill me, by jingo, it's murder."

There are other points about Mr. Swinburne's method of delivering his message on which it were possible to comment, still illustrating the commentary from his own pages. Whose style, for example, had he in his mind when he was writing of the "detestable as well as debateable land of

pseudo-poetic rhapsody in hermaphroditic prose"? Did no soft compunction touch him as he characterised the Spenserian metre as one which leaves some readers, "after a dose of a few pages, overgorged with a sense that they have been eating a whole hive's harvest of thick pressed honey by great spoonfuls, without one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sweet-stuff"? But we prefer to keep to the point we originally started from the unnecessary strength and directness of the "scientific definitions" Mr. Swinburne selects to explain things which really at this stage of human intelligence need no explanation at all.

The age has been often congratulated on the great improvement visible in its literary manners when contrasted with those of its predecessor. In whatever else (if in anything) we have gone back, in this respect at least we have all, in honest Joe Gargery's phrase, gentlefolked amazingly. It should be so; the newspapers are for ever consoling us with this comfortable factand giving us such earnest of it, too! And yet with this volume before us, and some recent freaks of Mr. Ruskin's this way still but too fresh in our memory, it does seem a little hard to believe that our literary state is one of such perfect grace.

Mr. Swinburne has, it is true, been a man of war from his youth upwards, and though he must now have some "relish of the saltness of time," it is very clear he has not lost the joys of battle or forgotten his "swashing blow." "In my younger days," once said the good old Johnson to Miss Reynolds, "it is true I was much inclined to treat mankind with asperity and contempt; but I found it answered no good end. I thought it wiser and better to take the world as it goes. Besides, as I have advanced in life I have had more reason to be satisfied with it. Mankind have treated me with more kindness, and of course I have more kindness for them." This does not seem to be Mr. Swinburne's view of things. Yet on the whole mankind

has treated him not unkindly. True, in his early days there were passages between them; but even those carping creatures called critics have not been altogether unjust to the author of 'Atalanta in Calydon' and 'The Garden of Proserpine;' they have agreed to forget 'The Leper,' and they have read 'Bothwell.' Mr. Swinburne having proved himself so strong, is it not time now that he should be merciful?

In all seriousness, does Mr. Swinburne consider not only how hard he is on us (which perhaps might not move him much), but how unfair he is to himself, how sadly he counteracts his own labours by this abnormal method of delivery? The retorts discourteous that two disappointed placehunters may fling at each other across the floor of the House of Commons, or in the columns of the newspapers, matter nothing. Your politician is a chartered libertine, and in their Parliamentary sense words and things. take a meaning, or a no-meaning, of their own. But in literature it is different. Literature has its duties, its responsibilities, and the word once written abides. Mr. Swinburne could be of much service to his age. His knowledge of literature, native and foreign, ancient and modern, is immense, and it is all at first hand: he has read it, not merely read about it

though that knowledge, too, is his in a surprising degree. His appreciation is as vast as his knowledge. All sorts and conditions of writers he can find good in; in Victor Hugo as well as in Shakespeare, in Pope as well as in Keats, in George Eliot as well as in Walter Scott. Nor was ever man's appreciation more hearty. It does one good in this Alexandrian age to hear him rolling out the full tide of his praise, till one feels inclined to forgive him all his faults, quia multum amavit. And when not distracted by prejudice or intoxicated by delight, how fine and true is his sense of all that is good! Imbedded and entombed in blocks of shapeless and inharmonious burlesque

a

(the expression is his own) lies many rare jewel; golden words, happy phrases, flashing a ray of light straight to the heart of the matter. One might say of him that when he treats himself fairly he never praises wrongly. In short, let us say it again, there is no one quality a critic should have of which Mr. Swinburne does not own at least some proportion.

And all these gifts, so useful as they might be made now, when criticism is, like Mistress Doll, sick of a calm, or, a captive Samson, plods its weary round,

"Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,"all these gifts Mr. Swinburne wilfully makes of no avail by freaks (to give them no harsher name) which out-Reade Reade himself in the very height of those "unwise and violent extravagances in the field of personal or critical controversy," for which he so justly brings the collector of 'Readiana' to task. How may we take a critic seriously who can gravely assert that all who hesitate to confirm his opinion of Lord Tennyson's 'Rizpah' must be "either cancerous with malevolence or paralytic with stupidity"? Here, in truth, is the Terrific Diction in full flower for, when this wonderful sentence is surveyed again, what is it more than that Mr. Swinburne has no high opinion of those who differ from him? What good end is served by calling the Carlyles "Thomas Cloacinus and his Goody," because they did not appreciate the worth of Lamb's proffered friendship-a blindness which surely was its own punishment? Is it possible to believe a man an authority on the "duty and dignity of self-respect,' who can write in these terms of Milton's deplorable readiness to engage with unworthy adversaries ?

:

"It is certainly no very dignified amusement, no very profitable expenditure of energy or time, to indulge in the easy diversion of making such curs yelp, and watching them writhe under the chastisement which an insulted superior may condescend to inflict, till

their foul mouths foam over in futile and furious response, reeking and rabid with virulent froth and exhalations of raging ribaldry. Yet when, like those that swarmed at the heels of Milton, the vermin venture on all possible extremes of personal insult and imputation to which dulness may give ear or malice may give tongue, a man cannot reasonably be held to derogate from the duty and dignity of self-respect if he spurns or scourges them out of his way. To give these rascals rope is a needless waste of hemp. A spider's thread, spun from the inner impurity of his own venomous vitals, will suffice for such a creature to hang himself."

But, in truth, it is no very dignified amusement that we are ourselves engaged in, and there shall be an end of it. After all, what is there to say but, the pity of it?-the pity of seeing a writer with (to borrow the last popular phrase) such gifts and graces voluntarily debasing himself to the level of "verminous fellows whom the

higher Muses at least should be con

tent to leave in the native and natural shelter of that obscene obscurity which alone is proper to such autocoprophagous animalcules as make the filth they feed on." And yet the man who wrote this wrote this also of Charles Lamb:

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in all those qualities which most endear his memory to us all he holds really of no man but himself. It is impossible merely to like him; you must, as Wordsworth bade the red-breast whom he saw chasing the butterfly,

"Love him, or leave him alone.' "All men worthy to know him would seem always to have loved him in proportion to their worthiness, and this inevitable affection would seem again to have given them for a time the very qualities most wanting to their usual habit of mind. It fixed the inconstancy of Coleridge it softened the austerity of Wordsworth. It withdrew for a moment the author of The Friend' from contemplation of metaphysics, and the author of 'The Prelude ' from meditation on himself."

Was ever Lamb praised more finely? Reading this, even with the memory of so much that is otherwise still fresh, what can one say but, "if the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged"!