296 



The i<eview of Reviews, 



March 2(/, 1906. 



THE LITERARY ARTICLES IN THE 

 QUARTERLIES. 



The Quarterly and Edinburgh have several 

 literary articles which, though they do not lend 

 themselves well to summary, are yet a treat to 

 read, so excellent is their style, so appreciative their 

 judgments. 



FANNY BUKNKY AND HKR TIMES. 



Two of these articles deal with Fanny Burney, 

 the Quarterly article being entire)}, and the Edin- 

 burgh articles mainly, a review ot the fine edition 

 of her '■ Diary and Letters ' r<;cently edited in six 

 volumes by Mr. Austin Dobson. The former 

 article is the more sympathetic to her as a woman ; 

 the latter deals more with the times in which she 

 lived. 



Miss Ikirney, says the Quarterly reviewer — and 

 the companion article says much the same thing — 

 '• from first to last, allowed anybt)dy and anything to 

 clip the wings of her genius. . . . i'lie artist in 

 her was never allowed to claim any right to inde- 

 pendent existence.'" Well, he admits, perhaps we 

 likf her better .so, even though *• probably she never 

 beciime half of what she had it in her to be." 



Tlie martyr of ooDscieme. 'he devotedly oliedieiit daugh- 

 ter, the most siiuerely h\iml>le-iiiiiided of all the people 

 vho have written siu-fessful liooka— perliaps that is a 

 greater and more beiiutiful achievement, certainly a more 

 inevitably lovable one, than any brilliant novel, heralded 

 and followed by however many trumpets of fame. 



But, says the Quarterly. Madame de Stael w^as 

 right in calling her " une demoiselle de quatorze ans,' 

 or, as he puts it, " the very genius of littleness." 

 " All her cleverness cannot alter, the fact that she 

 was always a young person." This is more sym- 

 pathetic, when taken with the whole context, than 

 the Edinburgh re\iewer's '' woman of an unimpres- 

 sive personalitv and of no great intellectual power. " 

 But both articles are delightful literary essays, and 

 both reviewers agree in their praise of Mr. Austin 

 Dobson's editing. 



TWO GREAT NINETEENTH CENTURY CRITICS. 



.\nother Quarterly article deals with Hazlitt and 

 Lamb, with the odi profanum rulgus personality of 

 the former and his comparative obscurity in the 

 world of letters as compared with Lamb. Hazlitt 

 was intenselv disliked by most of his contem- 

 poraries ; Lamb's name called up an affectionate 

 smile on their faces, as on the face of many to-day. 

 Hazlitt had great difficulty in keeping his friends ; 

 not so Lamb. " When a man deals as largely in 

 contempt as Hazlitt did, we cannot be surprised 

 at any and ever\- form of retaliation." The article 

 is, of. course, largelv a review of Mr. E. V. Lucas's 

 " Lamb," which is highlv praised. I make two 

 extracts from it: — 



As LaPib s^iys of Montaigne. " You may on any page de- 

 tc<'t ii ' Spe-*ator ' or start a " Rambler." ' so one may say 

 of Hazlitt tlian in his pages are to be found the origins 



of uiuiiy a latter-day essayist. Professor Saintsbury laya 

 the iireatest «f the Victorians Macaulay, Carlyle. Ruskin 

 —under direct obligations to hin>, even answering .Jeffrey's 

 famous question about the source of iiacaulay's style with 

 the single word " Hazlitt." W ithout committing ourselves- 

 to anything so detinite. we may concede that the immense 

 range of the lighter essay in our own day, as well a3 the 

 form of the more serious essay, began with Hazlitt. Nor, 

 when one comes to his limitations, his absorbing literary 

 sympathy with the great and even the lesser names of th© 

 past, and the niggard praise be deals out to contempo- 

 raries, shouhi we forget that he has more to say for con- 

 temporaries and about them than Ma<aulay had. 



"iliat Lamb was a poet is at the root t>f his greatness 

 as a critic." That Hazlitt was not a poet, and could not, 

 perhai)s we may say, have become one, is the explanation 

 of liis inferiority. 



OTHER AKTICI-ES. 



Professor Ciiimmeres paper on " C)riginality and 

 Convention in Literature is not very easy to read. 

 It deals with the alliance between individual feel- 

 ing, the individual in general, and the conventional 

 — between spontaneity and artistic conventions, if 

 I read the writer correctly ; the alliance, in fact^ 

 between genius and convention, which, he says, 

 '• is still our best definition of the literary process." 

 The last paragraph of the article is its most interest- 

 ing part. In the lyric, says Prof. Gummere, " con- 

 vention is still an open and a triumphant power." 

 And if, as many fear, poetry be forced to retreat 

 into her citadel, that citadel is lyric ; " and there it 

 can defy the assaults of time," 



In the Edinburgh Review an excellent article also 

 deals with '" Novels with a Philosophy." An in- 

 creasing tendencv with the better modern novelists 

 is, says the wTiter, to put a certain set of ideas or 

 convictions first ; not, as did the older novelists, 

 character— the human being. He illustrates his 

 view by taking " Kipps " ; " The Garden of Allah," 

 '■ The Divine Fire " by May Sinclair, and '• The 

 Difficult Way " by Mabel Deanner. 



Another paper deals with " Nathaniel Haw- 

 thorne," and the inadvisability of having so sijinally 

 set aside his desire that the world which he had so 

 consistentlv kept aside should have a post-mortem 

 familiarity with him. 



Several other articles will appeal to a less wide 



public— those on " Plato and his Predecessors, " by 

 Mr. F. C. S. Schiller in the Quarterly, and that on 

 '■ Lucretius " in the Edinburgh. 



In Seribner's ISLagazine the illustrations, in colour 

 and black and white, are, as usual, a feature. 

 Attention must be called to Mr. Ernest Seton 

 Thompson's pajxr on " The Moose and His 

 Antlers," which all interested in natural history will 

 find delightful reading. Many points in moos- his- 

 tory and habits seem as yet undecided. A map 

 shows how large the moose area still remains. Other 

 papers deal with " Reminiscences of the Impression- 

 ist Painters '' — Manet, Degas. Renoir, Pissaro, 

 Monet, and Sisley— bv George Moore, and with the 

 Villas of the Venetians. 



