Guinea' has scenes of the true Stevensonian glamour, but it has nothing else of the smallest dramatic truth. 'Robert Macaire' is a very elaborate joke, which certainly does not come off in reading any more than I can believe it to come off on the stage. Beau Austin,' although it has perhaps the best three minutes to be found in any of the plays, is no more than Sheridan-Goldsmith pastiche. And 'Deacon Brodie' succeeds only in making villainy appear more imbecile than virtue. It is in this play, too, that we have the most hilarious examples of the abuse of soliloquy. Henley in his article on Othello' speaks of soliloquy as 'an expedient in dramatic art abominable to the play-going mind.' In that essay he is inclined to accept the device because of Shakespeare's use of it, not seeing that in its proper function it may be a magnificent element in great dramatic form. But that a critic who could raise the question at all should put his name to a play in which over and over again one of the characters speaks like this:

'Now for one of the Deacon's headaches! Rogues all, rogues all! (Goes to clothes-press, and proceeds to change his coat.) On with the new coat and into the new life! Down with the Deacon and up with the robber!... Only the stars to see me! (Addressing the bed.) Lie there, Deacon! sleep and be well to-morrow. As for me, I'm a man once more till morning. (Gets out of the window.)'

leaves one, as they say in the ring, guessing. They just won't do, and that is all there is to be said of the plays. But, to leave them with the mind on that short scene in 'Beau Austin,' which is perhaps the best thing to be found in them, let me quote. Austin, it may be remembered, first at Fenwick's persuasion but now from genuine impulse, is about to present his addresses to Barbara, who has been one of his conquests. The lady's young brother, Anthony, a cornet who has neither brains nor morals, conceives it to be his duty to shoot or beat the Beau.

Barbara. Mr. Austin. (She shows Austin in, and retires.) Austin. You will do me the justice to acknowledge, Mr Fenwick, that I have been not long delayed by my devotion to the Graces.

Anthony. So, sir, I find you in my house

Austin. And charmed to meet you again. It went against my conscience to separate so soon. Youth, Mr Musgrave, is to us older men a perpetual refreshment.

Anthony. You came here, sir, I suppose, upon some errand?

Austin. My errand, Mr Musgrave, is to your fair sister. Beauty, as you know, comes before valour.

Anthony. In my own house, and about my own sister, I presume I have the right to ask for something more explicit.

Austin. The right, my dear sir, is beyond question; but it is one, as you were going on to observe, on which no gentleman insists.

Fenwick. Anthony, my good fellow, I think we better go.

Anthony. I have asked a question.

had

Austin. Which I was charmed to answer, but which, on repetition, might begin to grow distasteful.

Anthony. In my own house

Fenwick. For God's sake, Anthony!

Austin. In your aunt's house, young gentleman, I shall be careful to refrain from criticism. I am come upon a visit to a lady: that visit I shall pay; when you desire (if it be possible that you desire it) to resume this singular conversation, select some fitter place. Mr Fenwick, this afternoon, may I present you to his Royal Highness?

Anthony. Why, sir, I believe you must have misconceived me. I have no wish to offend: at least at present.

Austin. Enough, sir. I was persuaded I had heard amiss. I trust we will be friends.

Fenwick. Come, Anthony, come: here is your sister.

Henley, the critic, is another matter altogether. It may sometimes be charged against him that he was superficial, and, in a way, justly. But it was a superficiality which Henley himself would have been at no pains to disown, since what is meant is not that he did not feel profoundly, but that his interests were chiefly along the highways of critical thought and creative effort, and that he was not much concerned with the remoter things of speculation nor with the rarer and more elusive kind of personality. The result is that a few readers will find Henley's pronouncement altogether shallow and ill-considered, in the case of a writer such as Landor, for example. That imperturbable spirit, casting the imagination and passion, of which Henley speaks,

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into a form so austere, so little conscious of the world's judgment, so sufficient to itself, seemed to so plain and blunt a mind as Henley's to be 'not only inferior in kind but poverty-stricken in degree,' and its creative faculty to be limited by the reflexion that its one achievement is Landor.' This is to be superficial with a vengeance; and the fortunate thing is that Henley very rarely turned his attention at all to subjects of which he had so little understanding. It is in such studies as those of Fielding, Burns, and the motley that made up Byron's world, that Henley is at his best, not only as a critic but as a writer altogether.

The outstanding quality of all Henley's work in this his best kind is a moral courage of a particular strain which we to-day, taught by a generation of writers who in this at least have learnt wisdom, may find less unusual than it was, say in 1896, when the Burns essay was first published. Twenty-five years ago it was not difficult for a man to speak his mind about life; but, if he spoke with courage and independence, he was apt to find acceptance only among a small body of artists and thinkers. Thirty years had passed, it is true, since Swinburne sent the larger public into convulsions by 'Poems and Ballads'; but even after that lapse of time such a book would have been greeted with a considerable, if not an equal, storm of protest. To-day, however much it might flutter a few hearts, 'Poems and Ballads' would at least leave the moral sense of the public unshocked. And that this is so is largely due to writers, of whom Henley was by no means the least, who came out into the open and challenged, not a coterie but what is known as public opinion, with the declaration that nearly all moral judgments are immoral and that what really matters is not points of view but life.

In reading his essay on Burns, one is reminded of the teaching and practice of the truest worldly philosopher who ever lived, Christ. It is strange that so clear-sighted and lucid a moralist as the founder of Christianity should so often be advanced in support of a dulness of spirit that was the constant mark of his reproof. The people who said it against him that he consorted with publicans and sinners were at least intelligible, and stood for a definite, if bad, morality. There are a great many people

in the world who do not like publicans and sinners, who think that they themselves are better than publicans and sinners, and that some kind of outlawry is the desert of such as these. It is a most lamentable state of the human mind, but at least it asserts itself plainly, deceiving itself as to what is right but not as to what it thinks. The astonishing moralists are those who tell you that Christ consorted with publicans and sinners, as though it were a peculiar and crowning virtue in him that so good a man should have stooped to the company of these forlorn people seems to them to be witness of the most exemplary holiness. The thing that this kind of mind always overlooks is that Christ himself never thought of these people as publicans and sinners at all and that he would have rated in no uncertain terms the spiritual ignorance that supposes that he could have thought it any kind of virtue to foregather with people whom he merely saw as men and women a little more entangled by circumstance than others, and consequently needing an even tenderer understanding.

It is this Christlike spirit that informs such essays as these of Henley on Fielding and Burns. Here was a critic who not only had his fine sense of literary excellence, but brought a real ethical standard to his appraising of it, a standard that recognised first and last that self-righteousness and morality cannot live together. The result is that in the study of Burns, for example, we have the whole of the man quite fearlessly set down-unstable, betrayed by circumstance into all sorts of follies and even worse, often enough spiritually thriftless, descending at times to the level of a mean antagonist, and, with it all, magnificent. Henley sees these defects in his hero, and is no more afraid of them than Burns himself was at pains to conceal them. He passes no moral judgment on them, since moral judgment is not his business. He merely perceives them, vividly, as part of a character, moving in its other scale to a courage, a generosity, and a passionate charity such as have never been excelled in any human heart. And this complete Burns is, for Henley, life, something to contemplate with all one's understanding and humility, something so much more marvellous in itself than it can be in the testing by preconceived standards.

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Henley was, in fact, a good man, and like most good men said much that is shocking to the respectable ones. Also his goodness, as usual, expressed itself often with a very natural gaiety, which nowhere shows itself to better advantage than in the brilliant character-sketches which make up the chapter called 'Byron's World.' Nothing could be more spirited in its kind than the little study of Gentleman Jackson, Byron's great prizefighting friend, of whom the poet said, when some one suggested that this was no company for him to keep, 'Jackson's manners are infinitely superior to those of the fellows of my college whom I meet at the high table.' Jackson repaid the admiration in full, saying of Byron that nobody could be more fearless, and that he showed great courage always 'in coming up to the blows.' It is, again, the life that takes Henley's mood, the life of an age, as he says,

'dreadful no doubt; for all its solid foundations, of faith and dogma in the Church and of virtue and solvency in the State, a fierce, drunken, gambling, "keeping," adulterous, highliving, hard-drinking, hard-hitting, brutal age. But it was Byron's; and "Don Juan" and the "Giaour" are as naturally its outcomes as "Absalom and Achitophel" is an expression of the Restoration, and "In Memoriam" a product of Victorian England.'

Even when Henley makes his sympathy clear, as in the case of Byron against 'Pippin,' Lady Byron, he still sees all round his question.

'On Jan. 8, 1816, Pippin has asked Dr Baillie, "as a friend," to tell her whether Byron is or is not mad; a week after she leaves Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, her father's residence; next day, "by medical advice," she writes cheerfully and affectionately to her husband; and that is all. They never met again; and the next that Duck (Byron) knew of Pippin was that she had taken his child from him, and purposed-strongly purposed—that he should never more set eyes on either of them. He never did. Byron the poet, Byron the dandy, Byron the homme à femmes, Byron the lover, Byron the husband and father-the little country blue-stocking was more than a match for them. Against them all she set her unaided wits, and against them all she scored; and scored so heavily that in France, and places Vol. 237.-No. 470.

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