that he is no pedant, but a man of taste, and capable of tagging his remarks with bits of fashionable French, and even of Occasionally repaying in kind his correspondent's affluence of the latest scandals. Mason's clerical gown did not sit very well upon him, though he seems to have been conscientious and independent, and not without some genuine kindliness of nature. But he always gives one the impression of being out of place in his cassock. It would not be easy to find a more quaint expression of the unprofessional turn of mind in a clergyman than a defence of Christianity in one of his sermons. "If," he says, "the British Constitution will not enable a man to dispense with religion, we must admit that nothing can ;" and he proceeds to establish a proposition which certainly would not be considered as requiring defence in a modern pulpit-that even the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights did not supersede the Gospels. His claims to be a conceivable Junius seem to depend chiefly upon the clever squib called Heroic Epistle, which is an amusing burlesque of the architectural crotchets of Sir W. Chambers, and implies a want of reverence for George III, Mason took immense pains to conceal the authorship of this and some less successful sequels, and so far followed the steps of Junius; but it is impossible to fancy that the great pamphleteer would have made such a cackling over such a trifle, or have been so sensitive to the praises of his confidant Walpole. Gray speaks of Mason's " insatiable reforming mouth," and remarks that he has no passions “except a little malice and revenge. There was a good deal of acidity in his nature, developed, perhaps, by his uncongenial position and by domestic trouble, if he had not the rancor and force which make a great satirist; but in earlier days Gray found in him a simple-minded and enthusiastic disciple, who read little or nothing, but wrote abundance," and that with a design to make a fortune by it." His two poems Elfrida and Caractacus were fruits of this early fluency. They have been criticised elaborately by Hartley Coleridge, but belong, I think, to that kind and class of literature upon which serious criticism would be rather wasted. It is not that they are bad; rather they sug gest an uncomfortable reflection upon the quantity of real talent, as well as conscientious effort, which may be thrown away in producing work unmistakably second-rate and void of genuine vitality. We can better estimate the extreme rarity and value of genius by measuring it against the achievements of remarkable cleverness. Hastily read, or read whilst still possessing the gloss of novelty, Mason's work might look like Gray's. Here, for example, is the first stanza of a chorus from Caractacus, which Gray not only praised to Mason, but cites in one of his notes as a proof that sublime odes could still be written in English :- Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread, High towered his helmed head: 'spyed the sparkling of his spear: I mark'd his mail; I mark'd his shield; I saw his giant arm the falchion wield; Wide wav'd the lickering blade, and fir'd the * angry air. but Mason continues to the end with all Longer quotation might be tiresome; the manner of a genuine poet, and doubtless cheated himself as well as Gray into the impression that he had the real stuff in him. The effect is respectable at a little distance, though the work will not bear a moment's inspection. The general design of the plays, however, is more to my purpose than the merits of their execution. At that time the worship of Shakespeare, though sometimes extravagant, had not become a mere slavish idolatry. It was still permitted to see spots in the sun; and not yet fashionable for poets to try to revive the Elizabethan style, though Mason made one feeble attempt at a play 66 on the old English model." Gray, with his catholic taste, admired Racine, and began a play in imitation of Britannicus; and the faithful Mason decided medium between the French and that a 66 English taste would be preferable to either." He had also a fancy that the ancient chorus might be restored, so as at once to give greater opportunities for poetical descriptions and the graceful introduction of "moral reflections." Though Gray ridiculed his arguments pretty sharply, he stuck to his plan as obstinately as Sam Weller when insisting, in defiance of paternal remonstrances, upon a poetical conclusion to his love letter. Accordingly, in Elfrida and Caractacus, certain bands of British virgins and druids talk the twaddle and burst into the lyrical irrelevance which are the function of a chorus. Mason had abundant self-complacency; and though his plays had only a moderate success, owing to the bad taste of the public, he felt that his ingenious eclecticisms combined the various merits of Sophocles, Racine, and Shakespeare. Unsuccessful authors may well invoke blessings on the man who invented conceit. But Mason, after all, writes like a cultivated scholar, with sensibility to poetic excellence, though without real poetic power; and if we laugh at his taste, our grandchildren will probably laugh with equal self-satisfaction at ours. In truth, this fashion of writing plays not intended, or scarcely intended, for the stage, of which Mason was one of the first originators, is characteristic of the whole school. I will not argue a large question here, or deny that something may be said for the practice; and yet it seems as though a play which is not to be acted has a more than superficial resemblance to the feudal castles which were not meant for defence, and the abbeys in which there were to be no monks. The farm is dictated by conditions which are no longer present to the writer's mind, and are therefore apt to be a mere encumbrance. If you build a portcullis to let in cows, not to exclude marauders, it is apt to become rather ludicrously unreal. If you know that your play is to be read and not to be seen, the whole dramatic arrangement is on the way to become a mere sham. It does not grow out of the poetical conception, but is fitted on to it in compliance with a fashion. Why bother yourself to make the actors tell a story, when it is simpler and easier to tell it yourself? In this sense literature grows more "artificial" as it is encumbered with more dead forms having no significance except as remnants of extinct conditions. There was a time, we are told, when art was perfectly spontaneous, and the critic was happily not existent. People sang or recited by instinct, without asking how or why. That golden age-if it ever existed since men were monkeys-had long passed away even in the beginning of modern literature. Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, probably thought about the principles of their art almost as much as their modern critics, and were very consciously trying experiments and devising new forms of expression. But as the noxious animal called a critic becomes rampant, we have a different phase, which seems to be illustrated by the case of Gray and his fellows. The distinction seems to be that the critic, as he grows more conceited, not only lays down rules for the guidance of the imaginative impulse, but begins to think himself capable of producing any given effect at pleasure. He has got to the bottom of the whole affair, and can tell you what is the chemical composition of a Hamlet, or an Agamemnon, or an Iliad, and can therefore teach you what materials to select and how to combine them. He can give you a recipe for an epic poem, or for communicating the proper mediæval or classical flavor to your performance. If he is as clever a man as Mason, he will perhaps go a little further, and show not only how to extract the peculiar essence of a Racine or a Shakespeare, but how to mix the result so as to to produce something better than either. In one respect he has clearly made an advance. He is beginning to appreciate the necessity of a historical study of different literary forms. such quaint, old-fashioned criticism as Addison applied to Milton, where Longinus, and Aristotle, and the learned M. Bossu are invoked as final authoritics about the "fable" and the “machinery" and the character of the hero, we perceive that the critic is still persuaded that there is one absolutely correct and infallible code of art, applicable in all times and places. Milton and Homer are regarded as belonging to the same class, and are to be judged by the same laws. The later critic, taking a wider survey and rummaging amongst the antiquarian stores to discover any perils hidden under Dryasdust's accumulations, began to see that there were In many different types of art, each of which possessed its own charm and characteristic excellence. He scarcely saw at first that each form was also the outgrowth of a particular set of conditions, and could not be produced independently of them. It seemed easy to restore anything that struck him as picturesque or graceful. He could give the old ballad air by an arbitrary combination of bad spelling, or make his ruined abbey out of a scene painter's materials. This early race of critics had no direct hostility to their own century or to its early classicalism. They were not iconoclasts, but only adding some new idols to the old pantheon. They aimed at being men of finer and more catholic taste than their neighbors, but wished to extend the borders of orthodoxy, to repeal the anathema which had been pronounced upon the "Gothicism" and barbarism of our old authors, not to anathematize the existing order in revenge. They were quiet, orthodox, and substantially conservative, even if nominally Whiggish, and feared or detested revolutionary impulses of any kind from the bottom of their hearts. Such men as Mason or the Wartons tried literary experiments which are now of no great value, because they represent at best the attempts of a superficial connoisseur of talent. They did something by attracting interest to researches which produced greater results when carried on by more thorough workers in the same mine. But it is also true that they were amongst the first to fall into the blunders since repeated on a more gigantic scale by successors who have tried more systematically to galvanize extinct forms into a semblance of vitality. Gray, the man of real poetic genius, was also, if his friends judged rightly, the most profound antiquarian and the most deeply read of the whole school. Many of his critics have lamented the time which he spent in making elaborate tables of chronology, in studying genealogy, and annotating Dugdale's Monasticon, or Grosier's History of the Chinese Dynasties, or the Botany of Linnæus, when he might have been writing more elegies. There is so much to regret in the world that one would not waste much lamentation upon might-have beens. It is a thousand pities that Burns took to drink, that Byron quarrelled with his wife, that Shelley was drowned in a squall, and that Gray wasted intellect upon labors which were absolutely fruitless; but we cannot afford to sit down and cry over it all. We must take what we can get, and be thankful. But neither can one quite accept the optimist theory that Gray really did all that he could have done under different circumstances. The fire was all but choked by the fuel, and the cloisters of Pembroke acted as a tolerably effective extinguisher upon what was left. The peculiar merit of Gray is that he had force enough, though only at the cost of slow and laborious travail, to find an utterance for genuine emotion, which was enriched instead of being made unnatural by his varied culture. The critic in him never injured the quality, but only reduced the quantity, of his work. What little he left is so perfect in its kind, so far above any contemporary performances, because he never forgot, like some learned people, that the ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors. He could rarely cast aside his reserve, or forget his academical dignity enough to speak at all; but when he does speak he always shows that the genuine depth of feeling underlies the crust of propriety. He cannot drop, nor does he desire to drop, the conventionality of style, but he makes us feel that he is a human being before he is a critic or a don. He wears stately robes because it is an ingrained habit, but he does not. suppose that the tailor can make the man. In his letters this is as clear as in his poetry. His habitual reserve restrains him from sentimentalizing, and he generally relieves himself by a pleasant vein of sub-acid humor. But now and then he speaks, as it were, shyly or half afraid to unbosom himself, and yet with a pathetic tenderness which conquers our sympathy. Such is the beautiful little letter to Mason on the death of his wife, or still more the letter in which he confides to his friend Nichols how he had "discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one's whole life one can never have more than a single mother." Sterne might have written a chapter of exquisite sentimentalizing without approaching the pathetic charm of that single touch of the reserved and outwardly pedantic don. His utterance is wrung from him in spite of himself, and still half veiled by the quaintness of the phrase. of them. Obviously this is not the kind of mountain worship which would satisfy Scott or Wordsworth. Gray was perhaps, capable of feeling "the impulse from the vernal wood," as truly as Wordsworth, but he would have altogether rejected the doctrine that it could teach him more than all "the sages," and resisted the temptation to throw his books Gray's love of nature shows itself in aside except for a brief constitutional. the same way. He does not make poet- A turn in the backs of the colleges was ical capital out of it, and indeed has an enough for him, as a rule, and someimpression that it would be scarcely be- times he may thoroughly enjoy a brief coming. He would agree with Pope's holiday by the side of Derwentwater as contempt for "pure description.' a delightful relief after the muddy oozFields and hills should only be admitted ings of the Cam. Nobody could, in this in the background of his dignified sense, love nature with a more sincere poetry, and just so far as they are obvi- and vivid affection; but such a love of ously appropriate to the sentiment to be nature is not symptomatic, as with expressed. But when he does speak it Wordsworth, or Cowper, or Rousseau, is always with the most genuine feeling of any preference of savage, or rustic, in every word. There is a charming or simple life to the existing order of little description of the Southampton civilized society. It implied at most Water and of a sunrise-he can "hardly the development of a new taste, inadebelieve" that anybody ever saw a sun- quately appreciated by the cockney men rise before-which are as perfect vign- of letters of his own or the preceding ettes as can be put upon paper within generation, but not that passionate longequal limits, worth acres of more pre- ing for relief from an effete set of contentious word-painting. He rather de- ventions, poetical, political, and social, spised Mason's gardening tastes, it characteristic of the rising school. His seems, on the ground that his sham head, when he travels, is evidently as wildernesses and waterfalls could never full of Dugdale's Monasticon as of come up to Skiddaw and Lodore. To Ossian, and he reconstructs and repeospend a week at Keswick is for him to ples Netley Abbey in fancy to give a bein Elysium." He kept notes, too, charm to the Solent. He places in it a about natural history, which seem to monk, who glances at the white sail show as keen an interest in the behavior that shoots by over a stretch of blue of birds or insects as that of White of glittering sea visible between the oak Selborne himself. And yet his sensibil groves, and then enters and crosses himity to such impressions has scarcely left self to drive away the tempter who has a trace in his poetry, except in the mop- thrown that distraction in his way. ing owl and the droning flight of the Gray himself pretty much shared the beetle in the Elegy. The Spring has to sentiments of his imagined monk, and appear in company with the "rosy-bos- only catches occasional glimpses of om'd hours," and the Muse and the in- natural scenery from the loopholes of sects have to preach a pathetic little ser- his retreat in an an eighteenth-century mon to justify the notice which is taken cloister.-Cornhill Magazine. THE FRENCH PLAY IN LONDON. BY MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH opinion concerning France, our neighbor and rival, was formerly full of hostile prejudice, and is still, in general, quite sufficiently disposed to severity. But from time to time France or things French become for the solid English public the object of what our neighbors call an engouement— an infatuated interest. Such an engouement Wordsworth witnessed in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, and it disturbed his philosophical mind greatly. Every one was rushing to Paris; every one was in admiration of the First Consui. ulous, which belongs to the people of our English race. The sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children; but then we all of us fail in Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low de- it, we have all of us yielded to infatua gree, Men known and men unknown, sick, lame, and blind, Post forward all like creatures of one kind, With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee, In France, before the new-born majesty. All measure, all dignity, all real intelligence of the situation, so Wordsworth complained, were lost under the charm of the new attraction. 'Tis ever thus. Ye men of prostrate mind, A seemly reverence may be paid to power; But that's a loyal virtue, never sown In haste, nor springing with a transient shower. When truth, when sense, when liberty were flown, What hardship had it been to wait an hour? Shame on you, feeble heads, to slavery prone! One or two moralists there may still be found, who comment in a like spirit of impatience upon the extraordinary attraction exercised by the French company of actors which has just left us. The rush of "lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree, men known and men unknown,' of those acquainted with the French language perfectly, of those acquainted with it a little, and of those not acquainted with it at all, to the performances at the Gaiety Theatre -the universal occupation with the performances and performers, the length and solemnity with which the newspapers chronicled and discussed them, the seriousness with which the whole repertory of the company was taken, the passion for certain pieces and for certain actors, the great ladies who by the acting of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt were revealed to themselves, and who could not resist the desire of telling her soall this has moved, I say, a surviving and aged moralist here and there amongst us to exclaim : Shame on you, feeble heads, to slavery prone!" The English public, according to these cynics, were exhibiting themselves as men of prostrate mind, who pay to power a reverence anything but seemly; we were conducting ourselves with just that absence of tact, measure, and correct perception, with all that slowness to see when one is making one's self ridicNEW SERIES.-VOL. XXX., No. 4 tion at some moment of our lives, we are all in the same boat, and one of us has no right to laugh at the other. I am sure I have not. I remember how in my youth, after a first sight of the divine Rachel at the Edinburgh Theatre, in the part of Hermione, I followed her to Paris, and for two months never missed one of her representations. I will not cast a stone at the London public for running eagerly after the charming company of actors which has just left us, or at the great ladies who are seek ing for soul, and have found it in Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt. I will not quarrel ting attention to these French performwith our newspapers for their unremitances, their copious criticism of them; particularly when the criticism is so interesting and so good as that which the Times and the Daily News and the Pall Mall Gazette have given us. Copious, indeed-why should not our papers be copious on the French play when they are copious on the Clewer case, and the Mackonochie case, and so many other matters besides, a great deal less important and interesting, all of them, than the Maison de Molière ? news So I am not going to join the cynics, and to find fault with the engouement, the infatuation, shown by the English public in its passion for the French plays and players. A passion of this kind may be salutary if we will learn the lessons for us with which it is charged. Unfortunately, few people who feel a passion think of learning anything from it. A man feels a passion, he passes through it, and then he goes his way and straightway forgets, as the Apostle says, what manner of man he was. Above all, this is apt to happen with us English, who have, as an eminent German professor is good enough to tell us, SO much genius, so little method." The much genius hurries us into infatuations; the little method prevents our learning the right and wholesome lesson from them. Let us join, then, devoutly and with contrition, in the prayer of the German professor's great country 26 66 |