ANDREW LANG'S LAST BOOK

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1551, 21 September 1912, Page 9

ANDREW LANG'S LAST BOOK

«,,^ rof essor,.H:crfora thus reviewe in the Manchester Guardian"' Andrew Lang's last, book, a f'History of English . Literate A from. : Beowulf, to Swinburne" :- JUf, Aiidreir.Lanff -was tho most signal example in.our..time of tho kind of merit ? h Js:i*l embodied.in Goldsmith, drew tortn Johnsons ■ most' famous piece of monumental praise.- Ther.e was hardly any literary kind-fere nullum scribendi genus—which he did ' not attempt, and none that he attempted'"which he failed to adorn. Johnson spoko with less reserve about,his friend's art than about ins enterprise; there"weio things, such as epic, or- ode, which--he did not try, but *W,f :*™.d lie always shono in.' However that might be with Goldsmith, Mr! i?ui e ? m raemorative eulogist would probably do well to interpose the cautious "tore uL-the.second clause also. His most ambitious single book, tho ont> on which ■ £",!I 4 , h ! S!chlef io Pes of fume, was Probably.iis "History .of' Scotland." .Yet nis nnal place will' hardly be ■among ,tho great historians.- Of-many Kinds of skill and manv •■ branches of knowledge which go;to,the making of tho historian he was.a,master..- He.'knew the art of story-tell-inr through.and .-through; he understood custom and myth and all the'lore of primitive man;'he entered with the zest ot a-boy into chivalry -ami the romantic side of patriotism. But for tho sterner stuff-of historical science ho had little pa™™ .-aptltutte; or taste. Ho saw. the individual; lives,' and • related them with admirable instinct for every telling trait; but the .hidden , -nexus of-" events, the' obscure filaments which "give .inner' coherence to tho'picturesque welter of.circum-Htance;-/interested.' him little.- One might 6urmise,-without grave injustibe, that the interest. of. Scottish- history ' was facused lor'him in'the'story of Queen.-Marv, and that ,of I'rench history in the story of Joan of.Arc. , .' . • '• ■ •" '.

In, the ''History, of : Eiiglisli Literature," wl "oh; was to |je .his. last book, these gifts and .limitations'alike arc naturally to be Jound. Literary-history is by many persons a pleasant playground lor personal ldiosyncracies, and certainly the lnimy facets of Mr. Lane's personality Hash and twinkle across the page with inexhaustible vivacity. The Caledonian,, the ••Hellenist, Hid Folklorist, the Angler the.. Jacobite, tho Swordsman, the: clfamt jnon of Mary, of (he one and indivisible Homer,, and of Joan.. of Arc, and the curious.student of the whims and oddities of. custom-all thesa lively, persons who collectively bore the tribal name of Andrew Lang assert theniMlves without compunction'and without fail. Sometimes their intervention is apt and informing sometimes it. is informing but not very opt. The young-student who is inclined to. fake too'.literally the stock definition of the Renaissance as tlie "Revival of Antiquity" gets a vivid notion of tho distance between antiquity in its "revived" and, in its original state from n comment like this on the- Amazons of Sidney's "Arcadia"-:—'"'..■'

It is curious tocomparo Sidney's description of an Amazon with an actual, representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittito artist, discovered on the stonework of a gate. at. Boghaz Keni. That lady-warrior wears "a corselet of scale ermoiir, while Sidney's has n doublet of Gky-colonrqd satin,-covered with plates of gold. Her feet are.shod in crimson velvet, bnskiris, while the massivo legs of tho real Amazon are naked.

It is pleasing, but not very important, In , a. book where the limits of space are severely tried, to learn that Pope was .introduced to tho coffee-house wits by "the most chivalrous , and " accomplished of men... . .. .who rescued from'prison and brought to her affianced prince in Italy Prince Charles's future mother"; or.that Prince, Charles .himself, lurking in a Parisian , convent, read "Tom Jouea," boHi -in Eronck.aml/ English; or that Fielding's-., second wife..-was "probably of nn; .old and ruined '.J.ucob'it'o family"'; or that.Sfefne'<licd : .-iii-London, "alone, save for. the lodsihg-houfo keener and !> fnot.rnan,' a Jfacdonald of the. Kepnoch branch', .ivhose father followed Prince, Cliavlie, and

whose own childish adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a subject ni3do for the hand of the expiring humorist.. Tho samo kind of prepossessions betray themselves in much- of the criticism. Towards men's literary sins Mr. 'Lang shows himself on the whole magnanimously tolerant; but wrong notions on primitive religion are pointed out.with scrupulous, though still kindly, rigour, even whero (as with a Newman or a Huxley) those errors had no important bearing upon the • writer's -proper character or work. At the same time tho habits of mind wliich-have to answer for theso. amiable luxuriances are concerned in much of tho solid excellence which the book possesses. The single lives are told with' unfailing liveliness. "J'he alert instinct,: for the concrete side of things which is responsible for the irrelevances makes his chronicle of the rovelant detail accurate and full. And the knowledge flows easily from ample stores, gathered less by html' research than as ,tho daily harvest of a lover of letters who has read widely yet choicely and whose "scholarship, though -genuine and thorough, is mellow and urbane and untinctured with pedantry. Mr. Lang's critical perception was'versatile'and delicate, and not a'page of this book fails to attest its quality. Yet.he 'was more at home, more himself,: in the regions of literature which tie- apart from the mystical heights and depths of poetry. Ho loved Romance with', heart and .soul, "but it wSs'the human flesh and blood roriiance of Scott, not tho unearthly.,spectral romance of Blake—who; .by the ..way', .does not figure in his book at notless grave than that,'pf.a_n jH&ricnn predecessor whom he twitsjin for omitting Sterne! The' Cnrola'ns and AuEiistans are more in...his. wa.v' than' tho Elizabethans and Wordsworthians; relaively excellent as these sections'still are. The medieval romances,, and Malroy again, havo rarely fceeli better handled than here. Not a/few pointed and clinching remarks .' could _bo culled from, his pages, though the epigrams aro not always 'as final as they look,' and eometimes only open tho critical questions which they seem to close. At other times questions which -are really closed are airily treated as altogether open. "When Popo says 'First follow Nature/ what does he. mean by -Nature? . . . The poet refers [us] to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict; and of Greek art.ho- knew very little." But the mattor;is not. really 60 vague as this. With the help of Boileau and the Cartesians it can' be made pretty clear what "Nature" . l meant for ■ Pope-r-sonw. , - thing altogether other, in any case, than it meant for Wordsworth. Mr. Lang was more in his- element 'in {appreciating Pope's Homer; and these few lines of admirojjly discriminating praise may fairly bo set over against the more famous. "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer , ' of a yet' greater Homer critic:— ■ . .' .

"His plan was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, a form which his age could appreciate. It is almost us if ho had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of tho antique manner are gonoj but his ago would have thought them barbarous and fatiguing. Wherever there isrhetoric, as in tho speeches of the' heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external nature, he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour of his spirit." In a different kind we may notice the admirable brief account of Scottish literature in the eighteenth century, culminating in Burns. In general the book may • be pronounced a highly readable compendium of the story of English letters. For students of the literary affinitesof Jacobitisni, augliug, and other pleasant fanaticisms it is indispensable., Its worst fault is, as we have seen, an amiable propensity to disproportion. Tickell,' for instance, the hanger-on and "under-study" of Addison, has two pages, where Pope himself s has but three and a-.half.' But then Tickell translated Homer, and wrote an ode from a Jacobite lady in London to a Cavalier at Avignon, whom she finally deserted, finding'th'o Hanoverian dynasty better for trade!" •'•