The Sun.
London, England, 1865-05-20 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The New Periodical.

The Fortnightly Review. No. I. Edited by George
Henry Lewes. Chapman and Hall.

A more brilliant first appearance we do not re-
member ever to have witnessed than the one which
has now so auspiciously inaugurated the career of
our English double of the Revue des Deux Mondes—
THE FORTNIGHTLY. Prospectus and Initial Instal-
ment alike do honour to the good taste and the
sound judgment of the skilled man-of-letters by
whom this new periodical has been undertaken.
They evidence in a remarkable degree his aptitude
for the delicate and responsible duties devolving
upon one who aspires thus directly, frequently, and
persistently to influence and, if possible, to guide
the opinions of the more thoughtful among his
contemporaries. Mr. Lewes took occasion at once
to intimate, frankly enough, through the very first
sentence of his compact yet sufficiently explanatory
Prospectus, that the readers whom he designed to
instruct were essentially the thoughtful and the
cultivated. The contents of No. I.—the very names
of the contributors—attest upon the instant the per-
fect sincerity of this announcement. Associating with
himself, among other distinguished contributors
to this the initial instalment of the Fortnightly Review
the philosopher Sir John Herschel ; the humorist
George Eliot ; the critic, the Hon. Leicester
Warren; and the novelist, Anthony Trollope—Mr.
Lewes has here compacted together a number
worthy of inaugurating a great literary and scientific
periodical. By his own individual contributions to
this first number of the Fortnightly Review, he has
made good his own duplex claim to consideration,
on the one hand as a man of letters, on the other as
a man of science—here, as evidenced the most
signally by his biography of Goethe, to our think-
ing, his undoubted master-piece—there by his ex-
quisitely lucid and succinct exposition of the marvels
of Physiology—an exposition undertaken simply
with a view to the popularising of that most vi-
tally important among the Natural Sciences.
" The Heart and the Brain," a paper written by
the Editor, reads, in truth, like a chapter excerpted
from that famous treatise of his upon Physiology.
His disquisition upon the " Principles of Success in
Literature" being yet worthier of consideration than
his ingenious commentary upon the intimate associa-
tion of Head and Heart in the animal organisation.
And it is so, for the simple reason that (as we feel
quite sure) it lays bare many of the innermost
thoughts and feelings of the writer upon the
actual condition of his high calling nowadays.
It is the justest estimate we have, for a very
long while pa st, anywhere, encountere illustrative
of the perishableness for the most part of
the majority of literary reputations. The mere
fact that it is thus with this majority of so-called
reputations, affords us, in truth, a clue out of a very
labyrinth of bewilderment. For, otherwise, judging
from the swarms, the shoals, the myriads of books,
big and little, books of more or less pretensions,
light and ponderous, that are perpetually pouring
from the printing-presses of this country—it must
very soon have become matter for despair with even
the most voracious and systematic of readers
to keep pace with the flow of current litera-
ture.. The estimate formed of this flood of
books and, more than that, boldly avowed in
regard to it by Mr. Lewes, yields us in this
matter a sense at once of dismay and of con-
solation—dismay at the futile efforts of so many,
and consolation at the new-born conviction that it
is after all quite possible to keep pace with the flow
of what is really worthy of designation as literature.
The voluminous libraries annually teeming from
the press—Mr. Lewes has a very effectual
means of causing to dwindle down in bulk to
an easily appreciable compass. Clouds of books,
the names of which are for him as so much
mere chaff upon the granary floor, he winnows
away in a very twinkling with the inexorable win-
now of his judgment, as—books worthless because
imperfect and insincere. What multitudes of others
vanish upon the instant into so much thin air upon
his apt reminiscence of that pitiless axiom of the
epigrammatic Frenchman " on pent etre honnete
homme et faire mal des vers !" An utterance so
very poignantly illustrative of the frequency of
talents (such as they are) being only too often
sorely misdirected ! And so—by means of an easy
succession of fluent yet destructive sentences—our
caustic reviewer, by way, we presume, of giving
us a taste of his quality at the very outset of
his career as Editor of the Fortnightly Review,
sweeps out of all serious consideration one after
another—a man variously accomplished yet a feeble
poet—a real poet, yet a feeble dramatist—one with
dramatic faculty, yet a feeble novelist—a good
story-teller, yet a shallow thinker and a slipshod
writer to boot ! Not a man of letters, is there,
amongst the crowd, we feel perfectly assured of
this, but would be materially benefited by a
careful perusal of this admirable paper by Mr.
Lewes. It is wholesome and corrective, a genuine
tonic, in its influence. Could anything be more
happily applied—in deprecation of the notion of
any one writing for posterity—than that wise jack-
pudding's query in Faust, as to who is to amuse
the present—" Wer machte denn der Alitwelt
Spass ?" What is eulogised as brilliant writing,
this analyst or definer of the principles of
genuine success in literature, declares to be for the
most part so much mere " literary tinsel." Again,
solid acquirements he in like manner speaks of as
signifying, after all, little more than an acquaint-
ance with the classics. Finally, Mr. Lewes
groups under three heads what he regards as
constitutirg the laws of literature—these three
beads, being, as he intimates, simply three forms of
one principle. They are founded, he argues, on our
threefold nature—that is intellectual, moral, and
aesthetic

The Intellectual form—the Principle of Vision.
The Moral form—the Principle of Sincerity.
The lEsthetic form—the Principle of Beauty.

To these expressions he undertakes in subsequent
papers to give a very definite significance by means
of explanations and illustrations ! Undertaking, in
effect, thereby to demonstrate " that every work,
no matter what its subject-matter, merely involves
these three principles in varying degrees." And—
" 7 hat its success is always strictly in accordance with
its conformity to the guidance of these principles."
We had almost, here, appended to this italicised
sentence (extracted from p. 95 of the Fortnightly) the
logical significance of the initials Q.E.D. As a tho-
roughly insular, or national, or imperial commence-
ment to this new organ of public opinion, we have
the number led off with the first of a series of papers
by Walter Bagehot on " The English Constitution,"
appropriately prefixed to which is that sound axiom
of Mr. Mill, to the effect that "on all great sub-
jects much remains to be said." The first instal-
ment of this political series fittingly relates to
"The Cabinet." Upon Mr. Anthony Trollope's
new serial story, of which the two first chapters
are here given, a tale entitled " The Belton Estate,"
we should be sorry indeed to pronounce a decided
opinion as yet. For, without any question, it is
the very dullest commencement of a fiction that we
ever remember to have perused. George Eliot's
essay upon " The Influence of Rationalism," comes
to us simply as the reflections suggested to that
thoughtful writer upon a casual examination of
Mr. Lecky's history of the Spirit of Rationalism,
and of its rise and diffusion over Europe. As
for the dispassionate and unprejudiced chdracter
of Moncure Conway's " Personal Recollections of
President Lincoln," we may estimate the value of
all that—upon taking the merest sidelong glance at
the footnote of page 57, where the writer avers, when
speaking of Wilkes Booth, that he (the writer)
had not often seen, " a face into which more
vile passions were distilled"—the notorious fact
being that the face of that wretched young man was
not so much strikingly handsome as exquisitely
beautiful ! So much for the clear sightedness of a
political malignant—leading him to recognise in the
countenance of an Antinous the features of a
Gorgon. Algernon Charles Swinburne's tragedy
of " Atalanta in Calydon" elicits a most genial
recognition of its merits from the Hon. Leicester
Warren, whose auguries of future success for the
young poet, we shall yet hope to see justified by
works no less poetically fresh, and far less gtii3tiolly