Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/149

It bears out this classification of him as a man of action, not of thought, that almost every one of the forty volumes of which we have spoken is what might be termed occasional. His sermons, fine as they are, are occasional on the face of them. 'Tract No. xc,' is a tract for immediate consumption. The magnificent Apologia is but a pamphlet writ large. His Verses are, as their title-page informs us, 'on Various Occasions.' Even when he engaged in works that might seem to imply a purely theoretic interest, like his Essay on Development, they were written with a practical aim, even though it were a personal one—of working the subject out to 'quiet him,' as he said, somewhat after the principle of κάθρσις, familiar to the Greeks and to Goethe. His was not the writer's nature that is irresistibly impelled to writing and thinking for their own sakes. He thought, he wrote, that he might influence the actions of men. He did influence their actions, but, as a consequence, most of what he wrote has in reality died away with its practical effect, and of his forty volumes but a few sermons, 'Lead, kindly Light'—the one hymn of our language—the Apologia, and perhaps The Idea of a University, will form permanent additions to English literature. His histories are unhistorical, his criticism