Swinburne's book, as Mr. Gosse explains in his introduction, is the complement of his work The Age of Shakespeare. He had intended a comprehensive survey of the whole of the Elizabethan drama, the glories of which he spent a great part of his life in celebrating. He did enough of it to show what the complete work would have been; the outlines are all here, but they are only filled in patches.
That, carrying on as he did the Lamb tradition, and expressing it in his own language, he was sometimes over-enthusiastic, every reader of his sonnet on Tourneur knows. That he was liable to say incompatible things on different pages, where his purposes were different, is also common knowledge. We do not go to him for an exact "placing" of men or for temperate statement; it might be roughly said that he was willing to regard any minor Elizabethan writer as a master, unless he desired to use him to point a contrast with someone else, in which event the unfortunate playwright might be treated as a buffoon, an incompetent, and an impostor. Yet even of just and balanced criticism there is much in this book. No critic before him has so acutely dissociated the great Marlowe from the Greenes, Peeles, and Lodges, who are indolently classed with him. (It is characteristic that in making this dissociation he says of one of Peele's plays that it is "a riddle beyond and also beneath solution" how a man of any capacity could have "dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of Edward I.") And the essay on Chapman, here reprinted, is one of the finest panegyrics and most illuminating pieces of imaginative criticism in the language. He may, when he turns his searchlight on little men, illumine them too much; but Chapman was not a little man, and with space to move in and time to think in Swinburne here produced a masterpiece. The long passage on Browning and his obscurity is almost as good, so good that a digression, otherwise unpardonable, is self-excused.
The book as a whole is among Swinburne's best prose books. His writing is what it ever was. Almost every word and sentence is duplicated. He would write: "No man and no woman who has ever ridden on a bus or driven on a cab down the quiet bye-streets and crowded thoroughfares of Paris or of London could fail to have noticed with interest and to have condemned, or at least deprecated, without hesitation or afterthought, the design of the posters displayed on the hoardings or exhibited in the windows, even as, with no greater hesitation and no less microscopic afterthought, he would have," &c., &c. We feel that the sentences might have been split into halves and two books of precisely similar meaning made out of the one. Yet his manner is a part of him. Even his most serpentine sentences have vigour and directness when they are read aloud; and his invective is as entertaining as ever. Swinburne had a very small vocabulary as a poet, but a very large one as a writer of denunciatory prose. He refers to a play of James Howard's as "a piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the nauseated reader," and through a series of "laughing jackasses," "howling dervishes," and things ignoble, impure, infamous, and abominable he reaches the climax of his abuse with the beautiful appellation, "verminous pseudonymuncule."
Mr. Robertson also has planned a large work on the drama, but his is restricted to Shakespeare. He proposes to complete a series, of which his Shakespeare and Chapman was an instalment, on "the canon of Shakespeare." He has more concentration and more industry than Swinburne, and he may complete his task. He is not an inspired critic and, unlike Swinburne's, his manner does not contribute to the readableness of his books. He is often—though an engagingly acrimonious controversialist—heavy-footed; and he has a passion for words like "theorem" and "confutation" which is almost incomprehensible in a man who obviously loves the simplest and most beautiful art. In the present volume he tackles the problem of Hamlet. He ridicules those who think that Hamlet was very vacillating; who would not be upset if he discovered that his father had been murdered by his uncle and his mother, and who would not hesitate before killing a man on the word of a ghost? But he admits, as we all must admit, that there are inconsistencies in the play, and he argues, with what we think conclusive force, that these are derived from Kyd's lost Hamlet, which Shakespeare used as a basis. Here, as elsewhere (in Othello and The Merchant of Venice for example), Shakespeare was handicapped by his sources. Mr. Robertson sometimes pushes his arguments too far, and he exaggerates, we think (where he finds it convenient), the inexplicability of Hamlet's character. But he has spent immense industry on the book, and it is a contribution to Shakespearean study that no scholar will be able to ignore. We wish, by the way, that he would not spend so much of his time, here and elsewhere, arguing with people, German and other, who are not worth arguing with.
APPRECIATIONS OF POETRY. By Lafcadio Hearn. Heinemann. 15s. net.
Hearn was a sensible critic. But it is a fact—and a pity—that his criticisms of English literature were addressed to an audience of Japanese students. In examining a few of them (and we have already had two immense volumes) we get some instruction and entertainment from observing what he selects for Japan and how he explains it—a comparison and a contrast of the Eastern and Western points of view. Here and there, too, trying everything "on the dog," he reveals unexpected merits in English writers. In the "Interpretations" he demonstrated not merely the worth of Longfellow, but the intermittent genius of Mrs. Norton. But we can have too much of a rather interesting thing, and it is inevitable that these lectures on Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Morris, and various minors should be too elementary, however sound they may be, and however happy the quotations, to give serious English readers much satisfaction. We note with pleasure that many years ago Hearn was pointing out to Japan the great qualities of Robert Bridges as a poet of landscape.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE (1415–1789): A History of the Foundations of the Modern World. By W. C. Abbott, Professor of History in Yale University. Bell. Two vols. 30s. net.
Every schoolboy, in the Macaulayan sense, has at some time or other determined to write a history of the world in twenty volumes from the earliest times to the present day. Achievement is fortunately given to few. Omniscience becomes yearly more impossible, and, since the human mind can no longer single-handed cope with the accumulations of human knowledge, in history, as in so many other things, we have reached an age of intensive specialisation. These are truths which are continually being impressed upon us by the schools of modern history, and that they are to a great extent truths will be shown by a glance at any well-loaded shelf in a library devoted to the output of the modern historian. Yet there is distinct evidence of a reaction against this meticulous specialisation; there are signs that several most learned historians are discarding the historical microscope for the historical telescope and are yielding to the old fascination of writing histories of the world. The free airs of the New World seem to encourage this new phase of an old fascination. It is not very long ago that Professor Hayes of Columbia University took a large brush and a large canvas and produced two excellent and impressive volumes which he called A Political and Social History of Modern Europe. These two volumes were in effect a world history from 1500 to 1915. The mere thought of such a venture would produce a feeling of intellectual vertigo in most historians of the old world. But now Professor Abbott of Yale University comes along with two great volumes, and a promised third, in which he approaches world history with an even larger canvas and larger brush. He tells us himself that he is presenting us with "a new synthesis of modern history." We confess to as profound a distrust of the word "synthesis" as some people have of the word "definitive," and when a professor tells us that he has produced a new synthesis of history we are inclined to believe that this is another way of admitting that Providence has not granted him the gift of clear thinking or clear writing. But Professor Abbott's preface does him and his book an injustice. Some doctors, if you go to them with a swollen arm, will tell you that you have œdema of the arm; but there is no need to be frightened—the doctor is only telling you, what you know already, that you have a swollen arm. So, too, there is really no need to be frightened by the historian who assures you that his book has a synthesis; he probably only means, what you know already, that his book has a subject.
We have not discovered the synthesis in Mr. Abbott's 1000 pages, but we have discovered that he has a very good subject and has written, in many respects, a very good book. The book itself proves that he is well equipped with knowledge and has made full use of the intensive and microscopic study of the modern historian. But he approaches history from the standpoint of enthusiastic and large-minded youth. He has thrown away his microscopes and determined to look back at history through a telescope. Immediately a large and dominating fact has attracted his attention. The age we live in is pre-eminently the European Age. The world is dominated by Europe and Europeans: there have in the past been eras in which a race or races have by migrations and conquests spread themselves and their civilisation and government over wide spaces of the earth, but never before has there been so universal and permanent a domination and expansion from one small quarter of the globe. Professor Abbott, seizing his historical telescope, has looked back and tried to discover the origin, the causes, and the courses of this amazing phenomenon. And the more one investigates the phenomenon the more amazing it appears. Take the case of migrations. The European Age or the modern world, as Professor Abbott has no difficulty in showing, began in the fifteenth century. (In history, of course, there is really never any real beginning or any real end; there are no abrupt transitions, only faster or slower currents in the stream of change; nevertheless there are periods in which the movement quickens so perceptibly that they are clearly turning-points in human history; and the fifteenth century is undoubtedly such a turning-point.) Now one of the most striking facts in the modern world has been the migration of Europeans. In North America, Northern Asia, Australia, South Africa, and to some extent in South America we see the Europeanisation of vast regions of the earth still being accomplished by the most ancient form of migration and colonisation. At the same time Europe has sent out a continual stream of conquerors and traders by whose efforts practically the whole of the rest of the world, where the inhabitants were not exterminated, has been subjected to European rule and the European's political and economic system. As Professor Abbott points out, this was a complete reversal of the rôle of Europe and the European in history. "Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of America Europe had been rather the passive than the active element in that great shifting of population to which we give the name of folk-wandering or migration." And it is a curious fact that the new period of history, of the expansion of Europe, and of the modern world begins with an event—it is the event mentioned in the very first sentence of Professor Abbott's book—which involved not the expansion but the most notable shrinking and invasion of Europe and was characteristic of the old world. To the European of 1453 the fall of Constantinople before the victorious Turk seemed to portend one more desperate and disastrous struggle against a horde of Asiatic invaders, and the inevitable and universal blindness of contemporaries to the great movements and currents moulding their destiny and history could not be better illustrated than by this fear and foreboding of the European in 1453. Within a hundred years of the fall of Constantinople, instead of Europe fighting desperately against the non-European world of invaders, the non-European world was already engaged in a hopeless struggle against the swarm of European invaders. In fact, however, the movement, which within a generation was to send Portuguese and Spaniards ranging over Africa, Asia, and the New World, had already begun in 1453. Contemporaries thought the end of a European world had come with the capture of Constantinople; they should have seen that the fall of Ceuta to the Portuguese prince in 1415 and the discovery and colonisation of the Madeiras in 1418 marked the beginning of a new European world of colonisation, conquest, and territorial expansion.