commenced showing the way back to camp.

It

It is unnecessary to follow that journey in detail. suffices to relate that at about 9 P.M. three exhausted humans, with the head of their animal victim, painfully stumbled their way through the darkness into the camp. Had it not been for the moral spur of success they would probably have lain by the wayside that night. But they got in, ate a few mouthfuls, and crawled into the warmth of their blankets, out of which they did not stir for fourteen hours, and then only to eat and wash before starting another sleep.

And now we will leave them, for they will rest a week or so before facing the mountains again on fresh ground. We will skip the next two months, with their varying luck, and pass on to the time when a ragged but happy sportsman marched into Srinagur early one morning with a row of coolies, carrying grand heads, in his outfit, an incipient beard on his chin, and a thoroughly contented mind. Abdullah had no reason to find fault with either his chit or his backsheesh, and no doubt both formed his favourite topic of conversation in the Islamabad bazaar the subsequent winter.

Nor, if we are British tax

payers, need we think that because that young soldier has drawn four months' pay and has done no soldiering our money is wasted. For some day, perhaps, he will be hunting a species of game that is plentiful on the north-west frontier of India, and that shoots back remarkably straight. Although he will not actually have much shooting to do himself, he will have a company of soldiers to get into positions from which they can shoot under as favourable conditions as can be found, and the more mountaineering he has done the quicker will he be to find those conditions. He will have to supply the brain, eyes, and knowledge of mountain life for his townbred privates, trained under our patent and original system. He will have to teach them to march, feed themselves, keep themselves in health, and to watch for a particularly wary enemy. If he is town - bred and barrack square trained like his men he won't be able to do it, for nature is the only text-book on those subjects. Much learning may help one to write out the orders for an attack, but a knowledge of woodcraft is a greater assistance to company officers who have to carry that attack out.

T. FETHERSTONHAUGH.

THERE are no words in the language more misleading than Critics and Criticism. On the one hand we use them when we speak of Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge; on the other we call him a critic and his work criticism who 66 does the novels for the 'Eatanswill Gazette.' Lord Beaconsfield's famous epigram made confusion worse confounded. "You know who the Critics are?" said he in 'Lothair.' "Those who have failed in Literature and Art." The epigram, half true of mere reviewers, is wholly false of those who claim even a remote kinship with Aristotle and the masters, and it has cast an unmerited obloquy upon the professors of a delicate craft. criticism, in its highest flight, is philosophic and even creative. It lays bare the secret processes of the human brain; it explains the causes of pleasure and the grounds of taste. It may even call the dead back from the shades, and present to us the character and temperament of the great writers whose works remain

our

For

most glorious heritage. But a reproach still sticks to the word " criticism," and not even Matthew Arnold and Pater escape from the bar of public opinion without a stain. However, they and their fellow

craftsmen have found an eloquent champion in Professor Saintsbury, who has shown in his monumental work, the third and last volume of which is now published, that the true critic, so far from being a failure in Literature, is one who has succeeded in the management of a very difficult and delicate Art.

Professor Saintsbury's qualifications for his task are many and obvious. He has a passion for letters which neither time nor chance can quell. He is as intimately at home among the masters of the grand style as among the antics of the occult school. Truly he may say, without a boast, that nothing which concerns literature is alien to him. Many strange books, which the most of us are proud to have turned over, he has read and re-read; and his pages bristle with allusions which are not always clear to him whom he calls "the running reader." Moreover, though he writes of Criticism, he seldom afflicts you with doctrine or pedantry. He does not come forth, like Zoilus, with a set of irrefragable rules; and aesthetics are as little to his mind as a rigid system. In brief, the trick of Procrustes is most emphatically not his. "Extreme method," says he,

"in criticism is something of a superstition"; and from beginning to end of his book he tells you frankly what he thinks about this or that writer, not what you or somebody else ought to think according to law. After all, a critic, even of critics, can justly express no other opinion than his own, and if matters of taste were settled by rule, how dull a thing would literature be! We should all arrive at the same conclusion by the same road, and there would be as little room for enthusiasm as for caprice.

Another virtue, which we willingly ascribe to Profesor Saintsbury, is catholicity of taste. He can admire the talent of Diderot without running amuck at Coleridge. A respect for Macaulay does not blind him to to the exquisite work of Mr Pater. Above all, he shows a sharper eye for the good that is in a man than the evil, quoting more than once Coleridge's advice to the young "that it is always unwise to judge of anything by its defects; the first attempt ought to be to discover its excellences." And preserving always this point of view, he is able to do justice to such writers as Chateaubriand and Stendhal, Blake and Barbey D'Aurévilly. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to push his complacency too far, as when he finds an amiable word for the timid, superficial observations of M. Faguet, who seems to have won on this side the Channel a repute which his own countrymen properly deny him. But this is not the only point on which we differ from Professor Saintsbury. His

book, being a live book, tempts to disagreement in every chapter. ter. For instance, though we would condemn Taine's method as severely as does Professor Saintsbury himself, we cannot find that Taine's 'History of English Literature' is wholly worthless. Again, the Professor (we think) does rather less than justice to De Quincey, and in judging his work departs from the general principle he has laid down of preferring excellences to defects. If De Quincey were serious, he says, when he wrote his 'Appraisal of Greek Literature,' "actum est (or almost so) with him as a critic.” But however serious he may have been in the writing of this foolish essay, its folly does not affect the rest of his work and if you follow Matthew Arnold's general principle, and take away the three-fourths of De Quincey's criticism which is prejudiced or misguided, you will find a treasure of wisdom which suffers in no way from an ignoble juxtaposition.

Nor can we follow Professor Saintsbury when he holds that the drama is only "incidentally literary." The drama is (we believe), and has always been, a form of literature and nothing else. A play which is destined for presentation on the stage demands another technique than a poem which is only read in the study. But it must be "literature" all the same, unless it is to survive a moment for the amusement of the vulgar, and then fall into instant forgetfulness. The foolish plays which at the present time entertain the idle public have as little to

do with the drama as with literature. They are mere peep-shows, without meaning or coherence, and they could have no existence without their trappings. But the medium of drama, as of epic, is the literary language; costumes and carpentry are but incidents of the theatre. The drama can live, and has lived, on literature alone. To-day, eking out a foolish and precarious existence upon scenic display, it is neither literature nor drama. In brief, it appears to us as idle to speak of a "literary drama" as of "a literary epic,' and though the dramatist appeals to his audience by another word and another artifice than those which befit the poet, the word and artifice are literary or nothing. To-day both epic and drama are dead, but neither will live again until it acknowledges a loyal allegiance to literature. If an "unliterary" drama be possible, then the Oval Poet is of the tribe of Homer.

However, Professor Saintsbury reviews modern criticism with untiring zeal and "gusto," to use Hazlitt's favourite word, and he has given us a record of great achievements. It is with the Medieval Reaction that this third volume begins, and Professor Saintsbury describes with excellent lucidity the influence of Gray, Shenstone, and Percy on a changing taste. Now, this influence was felt not only in literature, but in all the other arts, even in life itself. The Middle Ages were emerging from their disgrace; and bards and ballads were at last arousing an in

terest once given exclusively to the classics; and the first step was traversed on the road which led to the triumph of Walter Scott. The taste in landscape and in gardens shifted with the taste in poetry, and the untrimmed country, once called barbarous, became picturesque. No longer did straight alleys and cut trees delight the eye, and Shenstone showed as clearly at Leasowes as in his work the symptoms of reaction. When Richard Graves contemplated Mickleton, which served Shenstone for a model, he contrasted in verse the new style and the old,—

"Is this the place, where late in tonsile yew,

Crowns, dragons, pyramids, and peacocks grew?

Where quaint parterres presented to the eye

The various angles of a Christmas

pye?"

In other words, the oak now supplanted the yew, and, strangely enough, though the counter-reaction in literature has not yet come, the taste for the formal garden has marvellously revived in our own day.

Wisely as Professor Saintsbury discusses the criticism of the Empire, he is (we think) at his best in his account of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their contemporaries. He sums up the great controversy of the Poetic Diction with perfect justice. The dispute arose, as every one knows, from a preface of Wordsworth's, in which the poet declared that the majority of the 'Lyrical Ballads' "were written chiefly to ascertain how far the language of conversa

tion in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Wordsworth's experiment failed; or rather it was never carried out. When once he had owned that metre is the proper form of poetry, he had confuted himself, and Coleridge's argument is clear and indisputable. "Were there excluded from Wordsworth's poetic compositions all that a literal adherence to his preface would exclude, two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased." In other words, Wordsworth is only a poet when, in defiance of his experiment, he employs a poetic diction, and once more the failure of pedantry is manifest.

But while Coleridge replied to Wordsworth with a dignity and moderation which might have convinced the author of Lyrical Ballads Lyrical Ballads' himself, Hazlitt attacked him with a bludgeon. He ridiculed the pretensions of "a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, on idiot boys and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old huntsman," This person's lyrical poetry, in Hazlitt's eyes, was "a cant of humanity about the commonest people, to level the great with the small." And so, wound up to vituperation, he proceeds with a kind of rough humour and rougher justice: "This person admires nothing that is admirable, feels no interest in anything interesting, no grandeur in anything grand, no beauty in anything beautiful. He tolerates nothing but what he himself creates; he

sympathises only with what can enter into no competition with him, with the bare earth, and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.' He sees nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it, but his own. His egotism is in this respect a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him." Thus speaks the voice of prejudice, and we shall better understand Hazlitt's criticism if we remember that, while Wordsworth was a Jacobin in poetry, he was an Anti-Jacobin in politics, and above all that he did agree with Hazlitt in revering Napoleon, his country's enemy. However, in substance Hazlitt is at one with Coleridge; the difference is that Coleridge's argument in the 'Biographia Literaria' remains one of the masterpieces of English criticism, while Hazlitt's tirade serves but to amuse the fancy, even though it contains the germs of truth.

not

The question, however, is of wide significance, and although, in Hazlitt's words, the poet hated chemistry, conchology, and Sir Isaac Newton, it is still worth while to ask why he set his affections upon the conversation of the middle and lower classes. Now, conversation at its best will hardly bear repeating; not even Coleridge himself could safely have talked with a phonograph in front of him, and the chatter of peasants, which Wordsworth deemed the proper material of poetry,