LITERARY NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1905, 25 May 1888, Page 32

LITERARY NOTES.

' Nobody can read Praed without being perpetually reminded of Thapkery in prose, just as nobody can read him without being frequently reminded of Mr Swinburne in verse. And, indeed, as Eton gave the latter a sort of hereditary right in him, so did Cambridge the former. — Saturday Review. Mr Steinitz, the American chess champion, has made considerable progress with a new manual which is to cover all the stages of I the art of chess from the elementary to the more advanced. He has arranged for its publication with a New York firm, and expects that his labour will be completed in the present year. Jeffrey thought " The Excursion " wouldn't do, and doubted of " Wilhelm Meister." Coleridge denounced " Faust." Scott's novels have been called pantomimes, and Dickens' pothouse pleasanteries ; high critical authority has spoken of Buskin's " Modern Painters " as declamatory truth, of Pope's " Essay on Criticism " as a pert, insipid piece of commonplace, of Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound" as drivelling prose run* mad, of Keats " Endymion " as gratuitous nonsense, of Tennyson's "In Memoriam " as meaningless. — " Lippincott's Monthly." Mr Appleton Morgan (the St. James' Gazette says) has become a contributor to the Shakespeare controversy. " Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism" is the title of his volume. It deals with such subject as " Shakespeare and his JEsthetic Critics,'' '• Much Ado about Sonnets," " Whose Sonnets ? " " Something Touching the Lord Hamlet," "Sir William Davenant and the First Shakespearian Revival," "Law and Medicine in the Plays," " Queen Elizabeth's Share in ' The Merry Wives of Windsor, ' " " The Growth and Vicissitudes of a Shakespeare Play," "Have We a Shakespeare Among Us?" "The Donnolly and Prior Ciphers and the Fumival Versa Tests." The book is nearly ready. Most cultivated persons, if they were asked what is the greatest poem in modern literature, would unhesitatingly answer, "Hamlet." But Voltaire called "Hamlet" the work of a drunken savage, Goldsmith exposed the absurdity of its most famous speech — "To be or not be," — and Sardou has recently called the drama idiotic. " Hamlet," says Sardou, "is an empty windbag hero, whom Shakespeare has clothed in a dramatic fog, and whom the German critics have stuffed with all their cloudy conceits, with all their uncertain dissertations, with all the smoke in their pipes, with all the besotted obscurity of their beer- cellars. — " Lippincott's Monthly." " A History of the Foreshore of the Kingdom from Saxon Times to the Present Day," by Mr Stuart Moore, will shortly be pub- j lished. Although the work will be purely legal, it will be filled with interesting abstracts of the public records, showing the origin of the Crown's claim in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the unconstitutional attempts pf the Stuart Sovereigns to dispossess the subjects of their estates, which, under Charles I, became one of the chief causes of of the great rebellion. The work will comprise a hitherto unpublished treatise in the handwriting of Sir Matthew Hale, a review of the dealings with the foreshore by the Commissioners of Woods and Board o,f Trade, and the nature of the Crown procedure against the subject. From the author's experience of the public records, the work is expected to be very interesting, and to throw new light on this hitherto obscure subject. " Locrine " is the best of Mr Swinburne's somewhat perplexing attempts to be dramatic. It is not such a mere welter of words as "Chastelard," or "Bothwell," nor, being a British story, is it disfigured by the painful strain to be classical which makes such hard reading of " Erectheus," and even, for all its fine choruses, of " Atalanta in Caledon," for it is, we presume, unnecessary . now to point out that there is nothing classical about those two poems but their names. " Locrine "is long, of course — immensely and unduly long. Mr Swinburne appears to be congenitally incapable of saying a thing once and being done with it, or of using less than six words when one would be sufficient. It is written in rhymes, grouped in the most arbitrary and unsystematic manner — one whole scene j (in the fourth act) being composed of sonnets. There is of course, too, the usual quantity of rhetoric — and rather windy rhetoric — posing as poetry. But for all these defects, inseparable from all Mr Swinburne's work, there is still much that is finely and genuinely dramatic in "Locrine," and perhaps more that is simply and intelligibly human than is common with him. Among his longer writings it stands, we think, high, if not the highest ; but we frankly own that we would give them all, including " Lociine," for his lines to Landor. — World.