LITERARY NOTES.
Mr. Swinburne's next volume should be a series of Songs after Sunset, with its opening pages allotted to the verses which appeared in last month's Fortnightly Review. In the lines on the Armada there is not a little of the inevitable after-glow from a fierce poetic daylight that is done. The fervour and brilliancy are still there, but dimmed and feeble, the mere shadow and suggestion of that hot radiance which burned through Alater Triumpiialis and The Halt before Rome. Perhaps there is something in the subject, — patriotism nowadays breeds only second-rate verses, and the Armada episode has been sullied, beyond hope of cleansing, by all manner of foul sectarian paws. But Mr. Swinburne's sense even of melody seems to be failing him — his measures have no longer the marvel- lous freedom and felicity of yore. The wealth of epithet and appo- sition is becoming an encumbrance that trails and trips up continu- ally the long stride of the rhythm. To be sure, Mr. Swinburne's music was never of the very highest order — never the music of flute or organ, but rather of the brass band — a glorified brass band, no doubt, but still brazen, and with a quite perceptible rub-a-dub run- ning through its clangour. After all, it is only thinking power that will carry a man successfully through a long poetic life. Passion and emphasis are very well if one is to die before forty ; but a man must scream himself hoarse sometime, and thought is the one provision against a poetic old age. All long-lived poets have been thinkers, but Mr. Swinburne, despite his omnivorous reading, has perhaps a smaller stock of ideas than any rhymester alive. PERH.4PS at the bottom Mr. Theodore Watts has something to do with the undeniable poetic decadence of Mr. Swinburne. At any rate he is popularly believed to have had of late much influ- ence over the author of Poems and Ballads ; but if so, then it has not been altogether for the latter's good. There is some sig- nificance, at least, in the simultaneous choice by both men of the Armada story as a subject of verse. Yet, even at his very worst, Mr. Swinburne could not possibly write anything so execrable as The Ballad of the Armada, with its spiritless and lumbering stanzas, and its half dolorous, half funny sing-song about ' breeze and brine.' Time was when nothing less than Greek would make a bishop, but of late years there seems to have been discovered some apostolic virtue in the vernacular. It is very questionable if a scholar may not best serve the interests both of research and of religion by a steadfast nolo episcopari ; but if a cathedral is to be the prize of erudition, there could hardly be found a fitter seat than O.xford, or a man more worthy of it than Dr. Stubbs. The Constitutional History of England has exactly that grave solidity, with just a touch of heaviness, which we are used to look for in the lucubrations of the mitre. Of all our historians. Dr. Stubbs is in manner and method the nearest akin to the Germans — his work is historical rather in the remotely etymological sense of the term than in its popular acceptance. In research he is accurate and inexhaustible, his judgment is almost implicitly to be trusted — but for story — ' God bless you ! he has none to tell, sir.' In Germany the final and fitting reward of such a man would be a professor's chair ; they give him a sinecure of souls in England. It is difficult to understand why any one should trouble himself or others with doubts about Shakespeare's right to be called a dramatist so long as that great question of the authorship of the Letters of Junius is still unsolved. There surely is vermin on which Mr. Donnelly and the whole breed of literary ferrets might legitimately flesh themselves. The Junius puzzle has grown positively to be one of the nuisances of history — a provocative of intermittent irritation like the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, or the character of Mary Queen of Scots. To plain men impatient of petty problems, Macaulay's much-maligned ' cock- sureness ' had for some decades been a source of unspeakable relief. Sir Philip Francis was as good a name as any other to fill a place in the dictionary of English authors, and as the man himself seemed to have been an unpleasant sort of person generally, no one had any twinge of conscience about imputing to him a set of the most atrocious libels in literature. But about Junius, Byron after all was much in the right — ' The moment that you had pronounced him one, Presto ! his face changed, and he was another ! ' What other he now may be, it is for the moment impossible to say, but Mr. Fraser Rae in the AtheiuEum will have it positively that he is not Sir Philip Francis. Perhaps the best course would be to carry the whole matter before the Allegations Commission — especially as there is no chance of producing in court the person from whom the letters were obtained. ' Obscene libels ' may be quite irrefragable as a law-term, but the use of it in connection with M. Zola's novels suggests a certain impotence in legal process as applied to the settlement of disputed points in art. Decidedly La Terre is not a pleasant book, but to place it on the same level with the avowed cantharides of writing is an action nothing less than absurd. Yet apparently there is no distinction possible if the law is to interfere at all — even equity being devoid of organs to apprehend the artistic. The case is made still worse when we consider that any punishment inflicted must bear the rankest savour of injustice — for there are plenty of our own classics quite as filthy as the Rougon-Macquart series, which yet no court in England would dare to touch. Who prosecutes proselytises, and the guardians of our national morality should remember that M. Zola is not only an artist, but the preacher of a specific gospel of art. In the long run there is no fear for morals — the world will make its own expurgation — but in the meanwhile we decline to take our index from the Central Criminal Court. There is a literary sin which some people will think far more heinous than any of the indelicacies of M. Zola. Why, if art is to bow beneath the deadening sway of 'law and order,' does not some Philistine bring in a bill to make plagiarising penal? It would not be one whit more difficult to draw the line between theft and legitimate adaptation, than to distinguish between obscenity and manly freedom. The latest ' conveyance ' of one most popular writer puts all former delictions of this nature com- pletely into the shade. To take the whole motive of a story, and its most piquant incidents from a book published not three years ago is a feat to fill all Grub Street with emulation and despair. And the motive, too, so very indelicate! There might even be a parallel prosecution for 'obscene libel.'
Miss Mary F. Robinson, now wife of M. James Darmesteter, the eminent Orientalist, has written a collection of historical essays, which are presently in the press. The volume will have for title The End of the Middle Ages, and will deal, among other things, with the causes of disintegration in the Church, and the origin of the French wars in Italy. It will end with the expedition of Charles viii.
Mr. Wemyss Reid, whose life of the late W. E. Forster was published so neatly in the nick of time, is now preparing a biography of Lord Houghton, the poet and poet's patron, at one time better known as Mr. Monckton Milnes.
Edhiburgh : T. and A. ConstabtCj Printers to Her Ulajesty.
