by Chris Miller

Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford University Press, 2008), ISBN 978-0-19920847-0, 816 pp, £25.00 (hb)

Geoffrey Hill’s American years have given us a new public persona: shaven-headed, dark-clad, equipped with a reactionary world-weariness and a Stentorian baritone that rings effortlessly over the academic mumble. This Hill is conscious of his role as tragic clown; his voice resounds with a despairing irony, a desire to provoke (to “bait”) that is somewhere between indignation and Monty Python. Finding himself behind the bars of that (mere) eccentricity to which Mill assigned art, he rages at its inability to drain the cess of today’s political and literary life: “plutocratic anarchy” as he was defining it even before the credit crunch. This Hill is a believer in Original Sin (Hill’s public baritone is full of capital letters) and a self-confessed Christian. The extent to which this is a new Hill is of course a moot point. He is, perhaps, somewhat freer in his public rhetoric. But we remember that the poem ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’ was reprinted as “necessary penitential exercise”; that The Lords of Limit begins with ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, in which his thesis is “presented garnished and groaning with obliquities” and continues through ‘Redeeming the Time’ to ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’. (In the context of the credit crunch, we need again to hear Hill citing J. L. Austin on his approval of that “plain saying”: Austin is “making play with the motto of the Stock Exchange”.) But in the new public persona there is now an overtone of “gloating with obliquities”. Hill cannot help but overhear his own Lear as fustian Hieronimo, inevitably “mad again”. When he frantically impales himself on the sword of political correctness he risks nothing so much as being dubbed by it “Sir Geoffrey”. Perhaps he has already refused the compliment.

The new criticism here is also in part a product of his American years and this review will focus on the three slim “volumes” added to the existing corpus of The Lords of Limit and The Enemy’s Country. Of these, Style and Faith was first published in the United States in 2003; Inventions of Value and Alienated Majesty are first published in this Collected. They cover a considerable range. Style and Faith deals with the new edition of the OED, a modern-spelling edition of Tyndale, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Night’, a collection of Early Responses to Hobbes, the first volume of Isobel Rivers’ study of the language of religion, and finally T. S. Eliot’s The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. In relation to Tyndale, Burton, Vaughan, Burton, and Hobbes, Hill brings to bear a degree of scholarship that it would be impertinent to “review”. The specialist of the period might blench at the extent of Hill’s reading. The second “volume” is Inventions of Value and focuses on issues of “intrinsic value”; it includes chapters on Gurney, Housman and Rosenberg (areas in which Hill’s scholarship is again to the fore) but ranges far and wide, moving from Bishop Joseph Butler and David Hume to Blake, Ruskin, Coleridge and Czeslaw Milosz. The third, Alienated Majesty, is intent on the issues of poetic integrity that have concerned Hill throughout his critical and poetical career. The interrogations here principally address Emerson, Whitman, Hopkins, F. H. Bradley and T. S. Eliot, with ‘A Postscript on Modernist Poetics’.

The first point to be made by any reviewer is that Hill is not a pellucid writer. His hostility toward many aspects of contemporary reality means that he is at his most accessible when, for example, engaging with (the words “railing at” spring to mind) the condescending populism (as he sees it) of presenting Tyndale’s New Testament in modern spelling. This and his review of the new OED are elegant and self-contained essays. In the other two “volumes”, there is sometimes slippage: a sense that the obsessions pursued are stable in a way that the ratiocinative procedures of the pursuant are not. When we read about ‘Eros in F. H. Bradley’, we are dealing with a deus ex machina. The arrival of the god is little flagged outside the title and he departs almost at once, after precisely the kind of arbitrary announcement that has endowed that phrase with its critical edge.

In these new essays certain quotations return again and again, acquiring a status like that of slogans; Hill apparently seeks to shore his ruins with these “fragments”. This habit is understandable, when, in his frequent public appearances, he can hardly hope to convey in brief the ground and nature of his convictions and may best do so by adducing the authority of the writers he cites. It is less justifiable in an edited collection. Are we to attach such importance to Hobbes’ antithesis, when he speaks of Sidney Godolphin, “unfortunately slain in the beginning of the late Civill warre, in the Publique quarrel, by an undiscerned, and an undiscerning hand”? The quotation appears in four essays and is referred to in a fifth. Are these “ordinary words” so evidently raised to an “extraordinary pitch of signification”? The praise is reminiscent of Donald Davie on Denham. Should a soldier hold fire till he has surveyed the moral and intellectual attainments of the foe? Would the relevant discrimination have killed the foot-soldier and spared the beloved poet? Emerson’s metaphor of Coleridge’s intellectual subtlety, “touching his mark with a needle’s point”, occurs four times; Coleridge is similarly honoured. The “double valency” of certain words such as “dexterity” in Clarendon and Hooker is several times evoked.

There is something paradoxical about these deficiencies, for Hill not infrequently writes sentences of magisterial authority. Reflecting on Hobbes’ use of “haunt” in “the knavery of such persons, as make use of… superstitious feare; to passe disguised in the night, to places that they would not be known to haunt”, Hill writes: “The irony at the expense of the ‘timorous, and superstitious’ who are so deceived is modified by a recognition, embodied in the syntax and cadence, that he is himself much taken with the modifying notion ‘haunt’ and with his own ability to give it the last word”, reemphasising the fact of postponement in his own performance of it (though we might jib at the description “modifying notion”). The satisfactory closure of the sentence cannot help but remind us of “When the poem ‘comes right with a click like a closing box’, what is there effected is the atonement of aesthetics with rectitude of judgement” from the first essay in The Lords of Limit. In the light of this, what are we to make of the opening sentence of ‘The Eloquence of Sober Truth’? “It is fortunate for the estate of humane letters, as we have received it from the writers represented in Early Responses to Hobbes, that a sense of overall and general truth may be gained as a real effect of such writings, irrespective of whether sincerity or authenticity (as we are inclined to understand them) can be discovered at the source.” The “estate of human letters” seems in fact to be reduced to the authors represented in that survey; the niceties of “overall and general” escape me; the word “real” is, as usual, a trapdoor to doubt; “sincerity and authenticity” are, in this context, either anachronistic or indeed connected in some respect with “truth”; but “as we are inclined to understand them” is evasive anyway.

The layering of Hill’s meaning is exemplified by the Preface to Style and Faith, where he argues that “in the best English writing of the early sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries… authors were prepared and able to imitate the original authorship, the auctoritas, of God”. This is surely uncontroversial. We think of Sidney in the Defence referring to the “heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature; which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings”; of Herbert’s ‘Jordans’, of Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’. Hill’s sentence continues with an apparently deflating proviso: “at least to the extent that forbade them to be idle spectators of their own writing”. How great a retraction this is, the previous sentence reveals, which quotes Calvin: “God distinguishes between the righteous and the unrighteous, and in such a way that shows that he is not an idle spectator”. The words “idle spectator” have, in Calvin’s sentence, a glint of perpetual torture. How do they apply to the human makar? One answer to this we have already quoted: “the atonement of aesthetics with rectitude of judgement”. What writers are ever “idle spectators of their own writing”? Should we quote Shelley’s Preface to ‘The Revolt of Islam’, where he confesses that he at times “completely failed in this attempt” to adopt “the stanza of Spenser” and regrets “one [stanza]… where there is left, most inadvertently, an alexandrine in the middle of the stanza”? Or Hill himself writing (p. 549) “That is not quite what I meant to say”? Hill’s Preface continues: “such implications of authority are also true of the best writing of later periods” though there they are “more isolated and more beleaguered”. “In saying this I have no desire to add my voice to the chorus of contemporary cultural lament,” he adds. It is a point on which he might easily be misunderstood: these essays are full of obiter dicta such as the reference, ironically in ‘Keeping to the Middle Way’, to “the feral openness of our time”.

In the Preface, he adds: “With Donne, style is faith: a measure of delivery that confesses his own inordinacy while remaining in all things ordinate. To state this is to affirm one’s recognition of his particular authority in having achieved the equation…” We seem here to have moved onto different ground, in which “faith” has, at least partially, become “conviction of style”. Is the conjunction of the “best English writing” with the trope of human and divine creation supposed to be causal? The sentence first quoted begins, “I am prepared to argue, and indeed this book is an attempt at such an argument, that…” There is something strangely absent-minded about that “and indeed”, but it is not misleading. The book is no such argument; unless by implication and (that favourite Hill word) contexture, it is not an argument at all.

Hill begins his review of the OED by cross-cutting between Hopkins’ life and the nascence of the dictionary. Few parallels emerge. In Hill’s view, the limitations of the OED are exposed in its failure to register certain of Hopkins’ more eccentric usages, one of these being “pitch” in “Pitched past pitch of grief”. He would be sympathetic to the claim that Hopkins had “pitched its significations beyond the range of the OED’s reductive method” if he were not aware of Hopkins’ own “model reduction”: “So also pitch is ultimately simple positiveness, that by which being differs from and is more than nothing and not-being”. Aside from the objection that giving an author’s own definition is not good lexicography, we should also note that this definition does not seem to apply to Hopkins’ usage in the sonnet. Hill’s burden in this essay is to connect the OED’s failure to fully define certain terms (such as dexterity in seventeenth-century politics) with the failure of lexicologists such as James Murray and Henry Bradley to give due weight to literature (Murray “held all his life that novel reading was a waste of time”); Hill refers contemptuously to their “post-prandial mutterings”. The OED was therefore the fruit of “second-hand philosophical doctrines and the myths of nationhood”. I am not sure the case stands. All such works are products of their times. Can a man with limited interest in literature be a good editor of a dictionary? Must a lexicographer be a good critic? Non omnia possumus omnes, as Virgil stoically reports. Hill’s expectations seem inordinate.

Two components of this essay, the notion of an orthodoxy that betrays the “intrinsic value” of thought and language and the existence of a dissident tradition in which they are honoured are the governing themes of Hill’s new essays. The key quote here is Coleridge’s “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS’, echoed by Hill in the essay on Vaughan: “Poetic metaphor is a means of converting the actual into the real”. His concern with authenticity of style pervades the three new sections and it must be said that Hill’s “needle” is extremely sharp. Bellelettrism is again and again unmasked, set off by authentic utterance. The quest for authenticity of style is, of course, Pyrrhic in itself. The quotation from Sidney above quickly moves on to “original sin”, as it is bound to do in comparing human artifice with God’s creation. “That innate incompetence, which Hooker… called ‘this our imbecillitie’” is another of Hill’s themes here.

The condition of authentic style remains for Hill that reflexive component in writing that acknowledges and undercuts its objectives even as it seeks to attain them. If that sounds like a parody of Hill, it is partly because such sentences form a constant in his criticism: “Intrinsic quality of style is the simultaneous recognition of strength and impediment which, as it declares itself triumphantly possessed of such knowledge, suffers the ignominious consequences of that possession” in The Enemy Country or “if the creative spirit is necessarily ‘bent upon itself’, then its deepest intuitions are ineluctably compounded with its most inveterate stubbornness and incapacity” in The Lords of Limit. (“Compounded” is another favourite Hill word: one thinks of Marvell’s “Alas, I find the serpent old / That, twining his speckled breast, / About the flowers disguised does fold”.) The antiphonal is of course a constant presence in his poetry. I have spoken elsewhere about the way in which Hill’s concern with the antiphonal relates to Deconstruction’s effort to exhume in the writer’s words the tendencies that contradict or deny what conscious intention has dictated. Hill, as we know, has constantly resisted these counter-currents in his own poetic style by authoritatively implementing them in the form of puns such as “Do words make up the majesty of man”, where the prima-facie sense of “constitute” is undermined by the implication of fiction or mendacity. In the light of these concerns, I wondered whether, in the introduction to Style and Faith cited above, Hill the believer was opposing the “hermeneutics of suspicion” by attempting to attach authority of style to faith. But the congeries of matters mulled over in ‘The Eloquence of Sober Truth’ is of course proof that deconstructive Pyrrhonism is merely Pyrrhic. Even with a heartfelt sense of the Godhead-signifier, Christians such as Donne and Herbert saw the meanings of revelation “through a glass, darkly”. It is therefore with some interest that we turn to Hill’s reflections on Inventions of Value and find him expressly unable to associate truth with religious conviction: “If the historical contextures are attended to, our search for an absolute standard of value takes on a complexion of relativity. I find this difficult to admit as a Christian”. This is an inhibiting reservation in a critic but compensated, as we shall see, by energetic statements of what criticism can do. A question arises, whether such statements are not themselves self-undermining; we might say that the powers of criticism are better asserted by example than assertion; and on this basis, Hill’s record here is mixed. This is partly because his arguments can seem, if I dare return to Mill’s words in this context, eccentric. To justify this remark requires a detailed examination of one of these essays. It is only fair to add that the essay is chosen as a particularly egregious example.

In the second essay of Inventions of Value, Hill takes as his title ‘Language, Suffering, and Silence’. He does so in the context of extremity, with Steiner’s book Language and Silence perhaps a very remote presence. Hill by begins citing the twenty-four hours that WWII résistants were expected to hold out and to the peine forte et dure suffered by Margaret Clitheroe (d. 1586) when she refused to plead, moving on to More’s “taciturnity” at his trial and St Paul’s “pacience and meeknesse”; these are compared to their “kenotic paradigm”, Christ before the High Priest. They illustrate an opening sentence otherwise obscure and questionable: “Questions of silence are essentially questions of value”. We turn then to the spiritual, “They crucified my Lord… An’ he never said a mumbalin’ word”, a turn justified by adducing Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, in which Christ “…took upon him the forme of a servant”, which translates the Greek doulos or “slave”—a fine and revelatory parallel. Now Hill moves from the silence of resistance to Wordsworth’s “silent joy”: that of those not given to articulate expression of joy. It is (bizarrely) compared to the “communion with eternal forces” discovered by Nathaniel T. Dett in the singing of old black women in a “backwoods” service. Moving (sans préavis) to “the public resonance and availability of ethical poetics”, Hill castigates Owen for his words “I came out to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can. Indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can” because they pass over in silence the fact (probably unknown to Owen) that Rosenberg, Gurney and David Jones spoke the same suffering from the ranks. There follows one of Hill’s more energetic assertions: “We are hereby committed to the critical view that shades of distinction—in sensibility, imagination and ethical position—can be semantically ‘placed’ and assessed.” In the light of this, Hill compares Tyndale’s “Though we be sinners, yet the cause is right” to Pound’s “To confess wrong without losing rightness”; the latter is condemned, fairly (though without context, the description of Tyndale’s words as presenting “a crux of Lutheran soteriology”—predestination, grace, and freedom of the will—is our first indication of what they mean). Next comes the passage about “historical contextures”, Christianity and relativity cited above.

Now we enter a new phase of the argument: “The contemporary pseudo-dogma which maintains that the degree of suffering experienced by persons of an artistic or literary bent shall constitute an accurate register of the quality of their work is one which requires close scrutiny.” This at least we can semantically and ethically “place”. “Close scrutiny” will seem excessive for a “pseudo-dogma” while “persons of an artistic or literary bent” ought to exclude par excellence authors such as Wordsworth and Lowell. Hill then compares Wordsworth’s engagement with social justice in his poems to Lowell’s “battening on the suffering of his wife and daughter” in Notebooks. Oddly enough, Lowell comes out worse. If Lowell made use of the suffering of others, he is of course excluded from the terms of the commination above. Wordsworth is said to have felt “an obligation to engage social injustice” in Lyrical Ballads, which is again a different matter from the “pseudo-dogma” cited. But nowadays solidarity with the poor and oppressed is, Hill says, so commonplace as to be “the equivalent of minor Elizabethan pastoral”. There is a clear failure of logic and integrity in this argument. Lowell is accused of exploiting not his own suffering but that of others; an obligation to engage social injustice is not deplorable simply because it no longer necessarily involves a penal loss of readership; and these words ring hollow in the author of King Log, an attack on the human consolations that (as I have argued elsewhere) battens magnificently on the history of human suffering.

Hill goes on to criticise Arnold and to cite Milosz’s famous remark about bullets that set the cobblestones “upright like the quills of a porcupine”. For the beleaguered observer, this “very amusing sight” (as Milosz puts it) judges all poets and philosophers. According to Hill, Milosz attempts “a general redemption of the imagination through the witness of extreme experience, of survived extremity. What the quoted passage actually communicates is something different: the elitism of the man-of-the-moment. It excludes from aesthetic regeneration those works unbaptised by an arbitrary extreme experience of “[Milosz’s] ‘brutal, naked reality’.” But Milosz does not mention a “general redemption of the imagination” nor does he say that works unbaptised by extreme experience are not aesthetically valid. He does talk about the strength of a poetry founded on “equally naked experience”; but he does so because a man faced with death is in a position to wonder how well-spent his time has been. Such extremity may be confining and Milosz’s “Eastern intellectual” is not in any case presented as model reviewer. But that intellectual’s view—“Probably only those things are worth while which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death”—is not wholly alien to the Hill who wrote that “in the act of making we are necessarily delivered up to judgement”. Moreover, there is no doubting that the phenomenon described by Milosz existed, even if we ultimately dismiss it as a phénomène d’époque. This is one of those situations in which young writers believe that everything must be founded anew, that it must be done urgently and that there can be no “emotional luxuries”. But notice that Hill’s initial objection was to attributing literary merit to suffering. Milosz does not do this and the remark “the elitism of the man-of-the-moment” combined with an observation from an earlier essay—“‘Tyndale’s ravishing solo’ must now be ‘heard across the world’ as if he were some dissident poet in line for the Nobel Prize”—strongly suggests a resentment toward the status in the West of translated “dissident” poetry.

Hill’s criticism of Arnold relates to the latter’s defence (in his preface to Poems, 1853) of his decision to exclude ‘Empedocles on Etna’ on the grounds that it represents unrelieved suffering that “finds no vent in action”. Arnold quotes Schiller —“The right art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment”—and Hill is right to say that the key word is “enjoyment”. But he is again wrong to say about Arnold’s exclusion: “What this is saying is that art cannot be tolerated if it does not issue in enjoyment”. The word “tolerated” betrays Hill. Arnold’s case is not even that such poetry is “unbearable”, merely that in a poem where “a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance”, in which “the suffering finds no vent in action”, the poetry is not enjoyable. This is not a general principle about the painful in poetry, as Arnold makes clear, saying of tragedy that “the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment”. Hill’s accusation that “‘action’ is confusedly both the topos which a poet ‘selects’ for the particular poem and also the activity of the world, a sphere of contingency into which the unsuccessful work of art fails, in some indeterminate way, to ‘vent’ itself” seems little short of perverse. Arnold’s poetics are conventionally Aristotelian; the representation of a continuous state of mental distress without event falls foul of Aristotelian principles of narrative and tragedy. Self-censorship on the grounds that a reader may not enjoy one’s poem may savour of condescension. But when Hill adds “the implied correlative, though Arnold does not quite say this, would be that the successful work of art does effect the existential leap from topos to commitment”, he is talking nonsense.

The essay closes with Hill’s respectful adoption of Hopkins’ answer to the question how “solidarity” can be expressed in the context of Hill’s own “theology of language”, the answer being “give alms”. Hopkins was advising Bridges to spend charitably some of what he would otherwise spend on books. Fine advice, but it is essential to several of the talismanic figures in Hill’s pantheon that their solidarity with others found admirable expression in their work. He would not admire Wordsworth, Hopkins or Whitman so much if they had simply given alms rather than “compounded” their political ethics with their poetical techne. Nor should such aspirations be discounted today, however commonplace. Many have given alms who make no appearance in the canon. Hill’s attitude is entirely at odds with his praise for Hopkins rehearsal, in a sermon, of Herbert’s “makes that and th’ action fine”, which quite wonderfully concludes “So then, my brethren, live”—thus illustrating Hill’s fine gift of quotation (and the scholarship on which it rests).

The obstacles in the way of summary here are manifold. In what follows, I risk the accusation of bad faith that I have made. I hear Hill in this essay attempting to come to terms with the fetishisation of suffering associated notably with the literature of the Holocaust, Stalinism and post-WWII Eastern Europe and the more far-reaching claims about the corruption of language (Steiner) and the unspeakability of Auschwitz (Adorno, attrib.). That fetishisation has also favourably affected the status of dissident poets in the West. This is obviously a question of the political ethics of poetry, with which Hill is notably concerned: “…I believe strongly that poetry is inextricably bound into the purpose and function of civil polity” as he has recently stated in these pages. This ought to have been a most welcome enterprise, bringing Hill’s unquestionable gift for unmasking the inflated and the pretentious and his moral seriousness to a literal matter of historical life and death. In fact, it stands in contrast with the constancy and integrity of purpose that he brings to the very fine essays in the same “volume” on Housman and Gurney. Hill deploys a wealth of scholarship to follow the course of Gurney’s intellectual development and a wealth of discerning sympathy in distinguishing Gurney’s language from the commonplaces and literary jargon of its time, with which it frequently overlaps. He stresses the honesty of Gurney’s efforts and aspiration—with which he obviously identifies (Gurney becomes a kind of inferior English Péguy). Indeed, one is driven to wonder why Gurney deserves such sustained and discriminating attention. Note the abrupt transition to the first person plural in that essay: “…our truths of first inscription, the objects of our love and fealty, are at the same time slighted, marginal to the world’s mart and focus of interest, and further… we have no privilege of remaining aloof from the crassest misjudgement, the cruellest slight.” Somewhere here is the junction between early and later Hill, in the breaking-point at the First World War of an English poetic tradition. Perhaps Hill should revisit the subject of Keith Douglas and set that poet’s work beside what, in the essay on Housman, he refers to as “the semantic and syntactical catalepsies of the last poems of Celan and the final plays of Beckett”. Hill’s careful assessment of Housman (his slightly unexpected ‘Personal Choice’ in Isis in 1954) issues perhaps necessarily in muted praise but produces criticism of singular acuteness, as when he cites the word “strengthless” in ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’: “the strengthless dead” flock round the be-laurelled youth in the underworld, echoing the Greek description of the ghosts in Book IX of the Odyssey. Hill observes: “One recognizes both knowledge and judgement in the rightness of Housman’s word”. This kind of patient and generous enquiry is what we might have looked for in ‘Language, Suffering and Silence’. But something has distorted his purpose in that essay; he swats at irrelevant flies. We hear in it some of the raging at his times that has also been a feature of his recent poetry.

In the light of these uncharitable verdicts, it remains to add that in the two final essays of Alienated Majesty, Hill writes some of the best and most perceptive criticism of T. S. Eliot that I have read; here his “indirection” and obliquity of approach combine perfectly with his gift for sounding the ethics of a phrase. Seizing on the style that Eliot derived from Bradley, he makes of it and Bradley an instrument with which to probe Eliot’s critical prose, surveying it for signs of Eliot’s move away from the heuristic early poetic work toward a poetry of dogma and a view of poetry as “a superior amusement”. Some of this movement, as he notes, took place under the impulsion of the patriotic motives of a just war—and perhaps, though he does not say this, with the guilty compliance of a man who had said in 1939 that non-Christians must pay their respects to Hitler and Stalin and that democracy was not a word abandoned by “sympathizers with the government of Germany”. Eliot is clearly a major predecessor for Hill and we cannot help but note their parallel movements toward belief. Does this help to explain the absence from these two essays of the political stances of Eliot? To say that I admire Hill’s discernment in these essays is not, however, to say that I agree with his arguments or indeed find them wholly coherent. To take one example, his discussion of heuristic poetics in the early pages of “Word Value in F. H. Bradley” is lacking the word heuristic and strangely replete with metaphysics. Hill’s prose generally proceeds without articulating the course of his argument; there is a disparity between the drama of reason as exhibited in the finest English prose—where syntax and tone make the argument clear without connectives—and the sometimes surprising leaps of connection made in Hill’s later essays. He has never been a pellucid prose stylist nor indeed one who has eschewed difficulty. The merit of these essays is their probing of language for ethico-linguistic integrity, an activity in which Hill is unsurpassed; he brings to the task an unremitting zeal, his gift for quotation equals Eliot’s and his reading is wider than Eliot’s. But the “overall and general” quality of argument in some of these essays is much less compelling than the fierce indignation and rhythmic authority to which his sentence-making intermittently attains.