in the mouth of the other—
“The wheel is come full circle; I am here”;
and—
“Yet Edmund was beloved,”
I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated soul who, once reading this same utterance of Mr. Shairp’s, rose, strode about the room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are you to do? What are you to say? Where are you to go? when a Professor of Poetry, uttering such things in Oxford, is not taken out, and stoned or burnt forthwith, between Balliol and the Randolph?” And there is an only less dreadful passage[[1144]] of miscomprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson’s “Love and Duty”—one of the greatest examples of the difficult “Versöhnung close,” the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.
But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete and careful perusal of Mr Shairp’s Aspects of Poetry, and of his other books, will indeed show that the apices of criticism, whether historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were beyond his climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of engaging in comment—eulogistic or controversial—upon the ephemera critica of the time, which has been one of the worst results of the change of the lectures from Latin to English. You could not, in the stately old vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon such a lower level as this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing with (or extolling reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton or Myers. Quotidiana quotidie moriuntur; and, though no doubt it saves much trouble to Professors if they can take out of a newspaper or a review, or even a recent book, on their way to Oxford, a text for an hour’s sermon, their state sub specie æternitatis is far from the more gracious. Oxford is constantly making new statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation from this Chair of critical or creative literature less than thirty years old would not be bad.
More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with things Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling, and transformed the parochial. On Burns (even though there must have been searchings of heart there) he could sometimes, though by no means always, speak excellently; on Scott superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on the Highland poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all, because he spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always amiable, often admirable: I wish I could say that it is always or often critical.[[1145]]
Palgrave.
The great achievement of Mr Shairp’s successor, Francis Turner Palgrave, in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had been mostly done years and decades before he was elected to the Chair. Indeed, I think little if anything was given to the world as the direct result of his professorial work. As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no doubt distinguished not over-favourably by that tendency to “splash” and tapage of manner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers of the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived. But his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships; and his friendships must almost have kept him right if he had had less taste. He may have profited largely by these friendships in the composition of the two parts of that really Golden Treasury, which, if it does not achieve the impossible in giving everybody what he wants, all that he wants, and nothing that he does not want, is by general confession the most successful attempt in a quite appallingly difficult kind. The second part, which has of course been the most criticised, seems to me even more remarkable than the first, as showing an almost complete freedom from one easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles that have come in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.