Cornice and Ravenna far, far behind him. As a matter of style, I hold the Benvenuto Cellini (of 1888) to be a masterpiece of skilful use of language: so that the inimitable Memoirs of the immortal vagabond read to us now like an original of Smollett. It is far the most popular of Symonds' books, in large part no doubt from the nature of the work, but it is in form the most racy of all his pieces; and the last thing that any one could find in it would be any suggestion of academic euphuism. Had Symonds from the first written with that verve and mother-wit, his readers doubtless would have been trebled. It has been an obstacle to the recognition of Symonds's great merits that until well past middle life he was known to the public only by descriptive and critical essays in detached pieces, and these addressed mainly to a scholarly and travelled few, whilst the nervous and learned works of his more glowing autumn came towards the end of his life on a public rather satiated by exquisite analysis of landscape and poems. Even now, it may be said, the larger public are not yet familiar with his exhaustive work on Michelangelo, his latest Essays, and his Autobiography and Letters. In these we see that to a vast knowledge of Italian literature and art, Symonds united a judgment of sound. balance, a courageous spirit, and a mind of rare sincerity and acumen. His work, with all its volume in the whole, is strictly confined within its chosen fields. It concerns Greek poetry, the scenery of Italy and Greece, Italian literature and art, translations of Greek and Italian poetry, volumes of lyrics, critical studies of some English poets, essays in philosophy and the principles of art and style. This in itself is a considerable field, but it includes no other part of ancient or modern literature, no history but that of the Renaissance, no trace of interest in social, political, or scientific problems. In the pathetic preface of 1890, Symonds himself seems fully to recognise how much he was used to survey the world of things from a solitary peak. His work then is essentially, in a peculiar degree for our times, the work of a student looking at things through books, from the point of view of literature, and for a literary end-oỶ πρâğıs ἀλλὰ γνῶσις is his motto. And this gospel is always and of necessity addressed to the few rather than to the mass. CRITICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ESSAYS Until Symonds was well past the age of thirty-five -nel mezzo del cammin—he was known only by his very graceful pictures of Italy and his most scholarly analysis of Greek poetry. I have long been wont to regard his two series of the Greek Poets (1873, 1876) as the classical and authoritative estimate of this magnificent literature. These studies seem to me entirely right, convincing, and illuminating. There is little more to be said on the subject; and there is hardly a point missed or a judgment to be reversed. He can hardly even be said to have over-rated or under-rated any important name. And this is the more remarkable in that Symonds ranges over Greek poetry throughout all the thirteen centuries which separate the Iliad from Hero and Leander; and he is just as lucidly judicial whether he deals with Hesiod, Empedocles, Æschylus, or Menander. Symonds was certainly far more widely and profoundly versed in Greek poetry than any Englishman who in our day has analysed it for the general reader. And it is plain that no scholar of his eminence has been master of a style so fascinating and eloquent. He has the art of making the Greek poets live to our eyes as if we saw in pictures the scenes they sing. A fine example of this power is in the admirable essay on Pindar in the first series, when he describes the festival of Olympia as Pindar saw it. And we who have been trying to get up a thrill over the gatemoney 'sports' in the Stadium of Athens, may turn to Symonds's description of the Olympic games of old—'a festival in the fullest sense of the word popular, but at the same time consecrated by religion, dignified by patriotic pride, adorned with art.' And he gives us a vivid sketch of the scene in the blaze of summer, with the trains of pilgrims and deputies, ambassadors and athletes, sages, historians, poets, painters, sculptors, wits, and statesmen-all thronging into the temple of Zeus to bow before the chryselephantine masterpiece of Pheidias. These very fine critical estimates of the Greek poets would no doubt have had a far wider audience had they been from the first more organically arranged, less full of Greek citations and remarks intelligible only to scholars. As it is, they are studies in no order, chronological or analytic; for Theocritus and the Anthologies come in the first series, and Homer and Æschylus in the second. The style, too, if always eloquent and picturesque, is rather too continuously picturesque and eloquent. Con espressione dolcissima is a delightful variety in a sonata, but we also crave a scherzo, and adagio and prestissimo passages. Now Symonds, who continually delights us with fine images and fascinating colour, is too fond of satiating us with images and with colour, till we long for a space of quiet reflection and neutral good sense. And not only are the images too constant, too crowded, and too luscious-though, it must be said, they are never incongruous or commonplace-but some of the very noblest images are apt to falter under their own weight of ornament. Here is an instance from his Pindar-a grand image, perhaps a little too laboriously coloured 'He who has watched a sunset attended by the passing of a thunderstorm in the outskirts of the Alps, who has seen the distant ranges of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flame-irradiated vapour-who has heard the thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snake's tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory—knows in nature's language what Pindar teaches with the voice of art.' And, not content with this magnificent and very just simile, Symonds goes on to tell us how Pindar 'combines the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine, the majestic pageantry of nature in one of her sublimer moods.' This is too much: we feel that, if the metaphors are not getting mixed, they form a draught too rich for us to quaff. Symonds has, however, an excellent justification to offer for this pompous outburst, that he was anxious to give us a vivid sense of Pindar's own 'tumidity— an overblown exaggeration of phrase,' for 'Pindar uses images like precious stones, setting them together in a mass, without caring to sort them, so long as they produce a gorgeous show.' We all know how dangerous a model the great lyrist may become 'Pindarum quisquis studet æmulari, Iule, ceratis ope Dædalea Nititur pinnis, vitreo daturus Symonds sought to show us something of Pindar's 'fiery flight, the torrent-fulness, the intoxicating charm' of his odes; and so he himself in his enthusiasm 'fervet, immensusque ruit profundo ore.' Whenever Symonds is deeply stirred with the nobler types of Greek poetry, this dithyrambic mood comes on him, and he gives full voice to the God within. Here is a splendid symphony called forth by the Trilogy of Æschylus "There is, in the Agamemnon, an oppressive sense of multitudinous crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air we breathe is loaded with them. No escape is possible. The marshalled thunderclouds roll ever onward, nearer and more near, and far more swiftly than the foot can flee. At last the accumulated storm bursts in the murder of Agamemnon, the majestic and unconscious victim, felled like a steer at the stall; in the murder of Cassandra, who foresees her fate, and goes to meet it with the shrinking of some dumb creature, and with the helplessness of one who knows that doom may not be shunned; in the lightning-flash of Clytemnestra's arrogance, who hitherto has been a glittering hypocrite, but now proclaims herself a fiend incarnate. As the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto has fallen drop by drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus but the end is not yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister when we regard it as the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture to fresh symphonies and similar |