Dies Boreales.
Perhaps hardly as much can be said of Dies Boreales,[[903]] which was written when the author’s bodily strength was breaking, and which betrays a relapse on senescent methods, with, naturally, no relief of juvenile treatment. The dialogue form is resumed, but “Seward,” “Buller,” and “Tallboys” are, as Dryden might have said, “the coolest and most insignificant” fellows, the worst possible substitutes for “Tickler,” and the Shepherd, and the wonderful eidolon of De Quincey in the Noctes. There is no gusto in the descriptions, even of Loch Awe: and among the rare and melancholy flashes of the old genial tomfoolery, the representation of a banquet at which these thin things, these walking gentlemen, sit down with the ghost of Christopher to a banquet of twenty-five weighed pounds of food per man, is but ghastly and resurrectionist Rabelaisianism. But if there is not the old exuberance, there is the old pleonasm. Wilson seems unable to settle down to what is his real subject—critical discussion of certain plays of Shakespeare and of Paradise Lost. Nor, when the discussions come, are they quite of the first class, though there are good things in them. The theory of a “double time” in Shakespeare—one literal and chronological, which is often very short, and another extended by poetical licence—is ingenious, if somewhat fantastic, and, critically, quite unnecessary. But the main faults of the writer, uncompensated for the most part by his merits, are eminently here.
Faults in all,
These faults, to be particularised immediately, result in a lack of directness, method, clean and clear critical grip, which is continuous and pervading. Forty pages could generally be squeezed into fourteen, and not seldom into four, with great gain of critical, no loss of literary, merit. Now diffuseness, a bad fault everywhere, is an absolutely fatal one in critical literature that wishes to live. It is hard enough for it to gain the ear of posterity anyhow; it is simply impossible when the real gist of the matter is whelmed in oceans of divagation, of skirmishes, courteous or rough-and-tumble, with other critics, of fantastic flourish and fooling. It is no blasphemy to the Poetics and the Περὶ Ὕψους themselves to say that to their terseness they owe at least half their immortality.
and in the republished work.
In the earlier, better known, and more easily accessible work the same merits and defects appear in brighter or darker colours, as the case may be. In once more going through the ten volumes of the Noctes,[[904]] and the Recreations, and the Essays, I can find nothing more representative than the Wordsworth Essay,[[905]] the famous onslaught on Tennyson’s early Poems,[[906]] and the eulogy of Macaulay’s Lays,[[907]] though I should now add An Hour’s Talk about Poetry from the Recreations.[[908]] In the first the author tries to be systematic, and fails; in the second he is jovially scornful, not without some acute and generous appreciation; in the third he is enthusiastically appreciative, but not, on the whole, critically satisfactory; in the fourth he compasses English sea and land to find one Great Poem, and finds it only in Paradise Lost. Everywhere he is alive and full of life; in most places he is suggestive and stimulating at intervals; nowhere is he critically to be depended upon. Praise and blame; mud and incense; vision and blindness alike lack that interconnection, that “central tiebeam,” which Carlyle, in one of the least unsympathetic and most clear-sighted of his criticisms of his contemporaries, denied him. The leaves are not merely—are not indeed at all—Sibylline; for it is impossible to work them into, or to believe that they were ever inspired by, a continuous and integral thought or judgment. There is enjoyment on the reader’s part, as on the writer’s, but it is “casual fruition”: there is even reasoning, but it is mostly on detached and literally eccentric issues. A genial chaos: but first of all, and, I fear, last of all, chaotic.