1. in_ernet_dli_2015_174108_2015_174108_The-Years-Work-In-English-Studies--Vol-ii

THE

YEAR'S

WORK

IN

ENGLISH

STUDIES

Volume

II

1920-1

Edited

for

The

English

Association

BY

SIR

SIDNEY

LEE

and

F.

S.

BOAS

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

LONDON:

HUMPHREY

MILFORD

1922

PRINTED

IN

ENGLAND

AT

THE

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

PREFACE

This volume follows the general lines of its predecessor, which dealt with the period from November 1919 to November 1920.

The survey is here carried on from the latter date to the end of 1921, although a few foreign publications earlier than November 1920 are noticed.

In future The Year's Work in English Studies will, it is hoped, cover the publications of the calendar year previous to its date of issue.

The Editors have been able to enlist the services of an increased number of specialist contributors, who are responsible for the opinions expressed in the sections under their charge.

Some re-arrangement of the sections has thus been made feasible.

It will facilitate the production of The Year's Work if publishers and editors of periodicals, especially those appearing in America or on the Continent, will send copies of books or magazines at as early a date as possible to the Secretary of The English Association (4 Buckingham Gate, London, S.W.).

S. L.

F. S. B.

2

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY.

GENERAL WORKS . . . . 7

By Robert Dewar, M.A., Professor of English

Literature in University College, Reading.

II. PHILOLOGY . . . . . . 25

By Hilda M. R. Murray, Director of Studies

in English and in Comparative and Historical

Philology, Girton College, Cambridge; and

Lilias E. Armstrong, Assistant in the Depart-

ment of Phonetics at University College,

London.

III. ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES . . . 33

By Edith E. Wardale, M.A., Tutor in English,

St. Hugh's College, Oxford.

IV. MIDDLE ENGLISH . . . . . 41

By Margaret L. Lee, M.A., Tutor to the Society

of Oxford Home Students, and Lecturer in

University College, Reading.

V. THE RENAISSANCE . . . . 54

By Arthur W. Reed, M.A., Reader in English

Language and Literature in the University of

London.

VI. SHAKESPEARE . . . . . . 66

By Sir Sidney Lee, D.Litt., F.B.A., Professor

of English Language and Literature in the

University of London.

CONTENTS

VII. ELIZABETHAN DRAMA . . . . 81

By Frederick S. Boas, LL.D., F.R.S.L., formerly

Professor of English Literature in Queen's

College, Belfast.

VIII. THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. POETRY

AND PROSE . . . . 101

By H. J. C. Grierson, D.Litt., Professor of

Rhetoric and English Literature in the Uni-

versity of Edinburgh, and Arthur Melville

Clark, M.A. With additions by the Editors.

IX. THE RESTORATION, 1660–1700 . . . 116

By the Rev. Montague Summers, M.A., F.R.S.L.

X. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . 127

By Edith J. Morley, Professor of English

Language in University College, Reading.

XI. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, I. 1800–1860. 149

By C. H. Herford, D.Litt., Honorary Professor

of English Literature in the University of

Manchester.

XII. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, II. 1860–1900. 175

By H. V. Routh, M.A., Reader in English

Language and Literature in the University of

London.

INDEX . . . . . . . . 187

THE YEAR'S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES

Volume I. 1919-20

Edited by SIR SIDNEY LEE

I. LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY. GENERAL WORKS. 7

By Robert Dewar, M.A., Professor of English Literature

in University College, Reading.

II. PHILOLOGY. GENERAL WORKS . 20

By Hilda M. R. Murray, Director of Studies in English

and in Comparative and Historical Philology, Girton

College, Cambridge.

PHONOLOGY 28

By Lilias E. Armstrong and I. C. Ward, Assistants in the

Department of Phonetics at University College, London.

III. ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES. 32

By Edith E. Wardale, M.A., Tutor in English, St. Hugh's

College, Oxford.

IV. MIDDLE ENGLISH 39

By Margaret L. Lee, M.A., Tutor to the Society of Oxford

Home Students, and Lecturer in University College,

Reading.

V. THE RENAISSANCE . 49

By Arundell Esdaile.

VI. SHAKESPEARE AND ELIZABETHAN DRAMA . 53

By Sir Sidney Lee, D.Litt., F.B.A., Professor of English

Language and Literature in the University of London.

With additions by Frederick S. Boas, LL.D., and the

Rev. Montague Summers, F.R.S.L.

VII. THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. POETRY AND PROSE 78

By Frederick S. Boas, LL.D., F.R.S.L., formerly Professor

of English Literature in Queen's College, Belfast.

VIII. THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 . 92

By the Rev. Montague Summers, M.A., F.R.S.L.

IX. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 101

By Edith J. Morley, Professor of English Language in

University College, Reading.

X. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER . 115

By the Rev. Montague Summers, M.A., F.R.S.L.

INDEX . 134

I

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

GENERAL WORKS

[By Robert Dewar]

The general history of literature seems to be out of favour with

scholars. Those who might reasonably make the venture prefer

to limit themselves to the survey of a special period, or to the

evolution of some particular type, or to the examination of some

phase or aspect of the larger theme. It is a sign of growth and

progress, no doubt. But the monograph-maker, with his habit of

peering into crannies and raking the rubbish-heaps of the past to

parade his particle of discovered truth, has much to answer for.

It is small wonder if the task of writing literary history on any

large scale grows harder and harder with every year. Even the

attempt to conquer the difficulty by collaboration must fall short

of complete success: we must be content to accept an unequal

story, troubled with lapses, or a story that walks the highway of

plain fact to the blistering of patience.

Under the circumstances, Sir Henry Newbolt’s English Antho-

logy 1 looks like a hint at a way out. But no more than a hint.

For to tell the story of our literature on this model, allowing those

who made that literature to speak for themselves—though a master

of ceremonies may marshal them and assign their parts—would

demand something resembling rather a ‘corpus’ than an ‘antho-

logy’. Title and preface alike suggest a book for the use of

historical students of English. We are not to expect another

1 An English Anthology of Prose and Poetry, showing the main stream of

English Literature through six centuries (14th century-19th century). Compiled

and arranged by Henry Newbolt. J. M. Dent, 1921. x+1011 pp. 10s. 6d.

net.

8

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

'portable collection of gems'; for 'in no case has a piece been

chosen without some definite reason beyond its literary excellence'.

This prose and verse garner is designed in its widest intention 'to

illustrate national life in thought', or more specifically 'to show

the progress of the English language and literature as the gradual

gathering of many tributaries into one stream, or of many charac-

ters and influences into one great national confluence'. It might

be described as a systematized collection of documents towards a

literary history of the English people. The experiment of such

an anthology was worth making; and Sir Henry Newbolt deserves

all praise for the way in which he has done his work. The only

regret one feels is that the book was not allowed to run to

double or even treble its present size. It is not only that more

might have been included. A greater room would have given freer

play to the principle on which the anthology is arranged—a prin-

ciple which, though simple, is at once its chief novelty and its

most characteristic excellence. 'The idea of the book', we read,

'is that wherever the reader chooses to open it, he shall have (in

abridgement) upon the left hand all the effective content of the

literary mind at that date: and upon the right hand, all that was

still to come'. And so the order of arrangement adopted is 'the

order in which the great writers of English made their decisive

appearance'. Simple and easy of application, surely. But we

find that the work of Chaucer and of Shakespeare must be divided

each into two separate periods, that of the translators of the Bible

and of Milton each into three. And Sir Henry Newbolt has to

confess that, 'as only a few illustrations can be given of even a

great writer's work, the gradual growth of his influence and its

possible changes, cannot be adequately shown'. Why not give the

anthologist more steering room, and let his course be determined

by the effective appearance of books (printed or circulating in manu-

script, as the facts may require) rather than by the decisive appear-

ance of writers? It seems a legitimate extension of the principle,

and one that would minimize, if not always remove, the difficulties

by the way. But perhaps it was set aside as threatening too much

a 'corpus' to be feasible. If so, let us have the 'corpus' too.

For this anthology heads in the right direction; and its quality is

sufficient guarantee that Sir Henry Newbolt is the man who could

make the elaboration better than another.

GENERAL WORKS

9

One other book that covers the whole field deserves mention—

Professor Strong's Short History of English Literature.2 This is

a regular history upon the old-fashioned lines ; and in his prefatory

note the author is inclined to apologize for writing it. ‘A partial

justification’, he says, ‘may be found in the attempt here made

to bring the treatment of the subject abreast of recent research and

criticism’. Dr. Strong—who, by the by, excludes from his

survey living authors and all those who are not British-born—has

no call to be so modest. His book is very much more than a mere

bringing up to date of previous works in the kind. Compact and

well-proportioned in its parts, and written in a crisp, economical

style, it contrives to handle its theme with a freshness and fullness

that preserve it at once from falling into the category of hand-

books, and from defaulting in the other direction through over-

ambitious emulation of the larger-scale history. Dr. Strong, in a

word, has given us a real short history ; and his book is to be

commended not by this or the other particular feature, but by the

witness of its high and sustained quality to the author's fitness for

such work. Not every one can write a short history which makes

good reading on its own account, and which yet possesses the higher

and rarer merit of remaining after all the humble usher to a greater

presence.

Among histories of a less wide range, histories that might be

described as chapters in the larger story, The Laureateship by E. K.

Broadus3 might stand as a model of how such things should be

done. A fine piece of scholarship, careful of the smallest relevant

detail, and patient to the last degree in research that all difficulties

may be resolved and decided, this story of the office of poet laureate

in England is at once beautifully proportioned, full and illuminat-

ing, and charged with an interest surprising in the subject.

Mr. Broadus gives about a fourth of his space to legendary and

2 A Short History of English Literature, by Archibald T. Strong, M.A.,

Litt.D., Associate Professor of English Language and Literature in the

University of Melbourne. Humphrey Milford. 1921. xii + 404 pp. 8s. 6d.

net.

3 The Laureateship, a study of the office of Poet Laureate in England, with

some account of the poets, by Edmund Kemper Broadus, Professor of English

at the University of Alberta. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1921. viii + 240 pp.

15s. net.

10

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

traditional poets laureate, that the development of the laureate tradition prior to the formal inception of the office in 1668 may be set in a clear light. Not a word of this prelude is wasted. How the title of poet laureate grew by suggestion from the academic custom of laureation at the conferring of the baccalaureate is here demonstrated; and the confusion attaching to those fanciful lists of poets laureate to be found in our earliest historians of literature and others is here set straight. The new material unearthed in these opening chapters is of value in itself. But Mr. Broadus is still more to be congratulated on his application of this new material to the clearer definition of terms and to the elucidation of a piece of literary history hitherto vague and only half intelligible.

It is to be noted indeed as a virtue in Mr. Broadus that he is not given to announcing his own particular discoveries at the expense of the proportions of his subject: they fall from his pen, here and everywhere, as it were casually in the course of the narrative. There is the generous episode, for example, in the prefatory pages, that stays to interpret for us Suckling's Session of the Poets. It is a familiar poem; and the curt reference of a foot-note would have been some men's way. But Mr. Broadus graciously rests his reader by giving text; and the familiar becomes for the first time in history really perceptible under his exposition of it as primarily a document significant of a growing interest in the laureateship idea.

Nor does he drop this pleasing habit in the later and principal chapters of his book. Here Mr. Broadus's task was perhaps more to arrange and interpret material already in some degree known than to present us with new discoveries. From Dryden to Mr. Bridges the story is that of an established institution: documents are plentiful and plain in reference: and Mr. Broadus's division, presenting three phases, is both lucid and convincing. He has chosen, however, to combine with his main discussion of the characteristics of the office some account also of the poets laureate themselves. And so even here new matter crops out on occasion: a careful reader will note many a corrected error of detail, some of wider bearing and importance than their unobtrusive mention might seem to imply. Thus, to quote but two examples, Dryden's pensions and his change of religion are topics that grow clearer for us under Mr. Broadus's pen; and Colley Cibber's exaltation in Pope's

Dunciad is given its proper background of a contemporary view.

Even the dullest phase of the laureateship in the eighteenth century is made to yield profitable and interesting reading, as Mr.

Broadus applies research to bring alive and render humanly knowable such minor poets as Rowe, Eusden, Cibber, Whitehead,

Warton, and Pye.

A Short History of the English Drama, by Benjamin Brawley,4

'makes no special effort to be either original or profound. It

aims simply to set forth in brief compass the main facts that one

might wish to have at hand in his first course in the English

Drama'. It is, in fact, a compilation, and leans upon larger histories

of the subject. It covers the field from the beginnings to our own

time, not excluding living playwrights.

In Professor R. P. Baker's History of English-Canadian Litera-

ture to the Confederation5 we have a sign of the awakening of

Canada. The judgement of literature displayed is somewhat

erratic, forgetful at times of standards reached in English literature

as a whole. Professor Pelham Edgar's shorter account in the

Cambridge History of English Literature is both clearer and more

assuring. But the truth is that Professor Baker's book rather

belies its title. He has seen fit to attempt a sketch of English

civilization in Canada prior to 1867; and the literature he dis-

cusses is apt to assume significance accordingly. It is this larger

aim, no doubt, that dictated consideration of 'only those authors of

Canadian descent who maintained their connexion with their native

country and those of European birth and education who became

identified with its development. Within these limits,' he con-

tinues, 'I hope to portray the life and temper of the English-

Canadian people, to trace their literary relations with Great

Britain and the United States, the two countries with which they

have been most intimately connected, and to determine their

intellectual origin'. Here is matter for a good book and a desir-

able. And Professor Baker has so essayed the task that the debt

4 A Short History of the English Drama, by Benjamin Brawley. London:

Harrap [1921]. ix + 260 pp. 7s. 6d.

5 A History of English-Canadian Literature to the Confederation: Its

Relation to the Literature of Great Britain and the United States. By

Ray Palmer Baker, Ph.D., Professor of English in the Rensselaer Poly-

technic Institute. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (London:

Humphrey Milford.) 1920. x + 200 pp. 10s. 6d. net.

12

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

of English-Canadian culture, through the 'Loyalist' tradition, to

the United States is plausibly argued ; though talk of the 'Ameri-

canization of Canada ' is declared to be 'folly'. The argument of

the book in short recognizes—perhaps was inspired .by—that

'development of national consciousness ' which its author notes as

'the chief feature of the last four decades ' of Canadian life and

history. National consciousness apparently has produced national

pride. And Canada begins to examine her past that she may

establish distinctions. We may cavil at the form, even at the

title, of Professor Baker's book, and regret that he did not give us

outright a history of English-Canadian thought and civilization,

illustrated perhaps by reference to literature, but also and more

fully by reference to other phases of the subject as vitally significant.

The book is, nevertheless, a happy omen, the sign of an awakening

for which we are grateful.

Mr. Withington's English Pageantry6 seems to have been

ready for the press in 1914. Delay in publication has enabled him

to continue the work and to add material as late as 1919. ' An

historical outline ' is our author's description of these bulky volumes.

So Fleay or Ritson or any of our nineteenth-century antiquaries

would have chosen to describe the work ; which indeed is strangely

reminiscent, in method and composition, of the way of the anti-

quary with history. Historians and readers of to-day are more

likely to regard it as the materials for such an outline, to wish that

more space had been given to critical comment as against citation

of evidence, and that some, at least, of the evidence adduced had

been less indirectly relevant. But the way of the antiquary,

perhaps, is as good as another with a subject so fallen to bits by

usage that the very words 'pageant' and 'pageantry' have long

ceased to carry any definite meaning. The boundaries of the

subject need rediscovering and redefining as the first step towards

historical discussion. And 'beating the bounds ' is a ceremony

plainly to Mr. Withington's taste. From the opening chapters,

which enumerate the heterogeneous elements of the pageant and

examine the various sources—folk and other—from which these

elements have been derived or borrowed ; through the elaborate

6

English Pageantry : An Historical Outline, by Robert Withington. Cam-

bridge : Harvard University Press. (London : Humphrey Milford.) Vol. I.

1918. xx + 258 pp. 17s. net. Vol. II. 1920. vi + 435 pp. 25s. net.

reports, both in their flourishing and in their decay, of the ‘Royal-

Entry’ and the ‘Lord Mayor’s Show’; to the discussion of the

twentieth-century or ‘Parkerian’ pageant—it is obvious that a

principal.aim of this work is to fix a meaning upon the terms

‘pageant’ and ‘pageantry’, that its drift is towards definition and

classification. The pity of it is that when you have sifted the true

from the false and have got the warrant of history for a compara-

tively lucid definition of early pageantry (i.e. of pageantry as it was

known prior to 1900); you are faced with Mr. Louis N. Parker

and his ‘Parkerian’ variety, born at Sherborne in 1905: and your

work is all to do again. Mr. Withington sees the difficulty: and

the chief value of his work lies in its mapping of the two regions.

A bibliography, extensive though not complete, a very full index,

two pages of corrections and additions inserted at the end of the

second volume, and illustrations contribute to its usefulness.

A useful contribution to knowledge upon a dry and difficult

subject is Dr. F. R. Amos’s Early Theories of Translation.7 The

author’s desire to keep ‘within measurable limits’ has led her to

confine her attention—unfortunately for the interest of her mono-

graph—to ‘such opinions as have been put into words’, and to

avoid ‘making use of deductions from practice other than a few

obvious and generally accepted conclusions’. This involves, she

confesses, ‘the omission of some important’ (and, we might add,

some of the most suggestive) ‘elements in the history of the theory

of translation, in that it ignores the discrepancies between precept

and practice, and the influence which practice has exerted upon

theory’. Her book resembles the more, in consequence, a lopped

and withering branch, though it may show well enough as belong-

ing once to a proper tree. For the theory of translation, as

explicitly worded in English, is a thing of no uniform or even

approximately uniform advance. It exists to little or no purpose,

a sort of parasite upon the body of literature. Dr. Amos’s mono-

graph is eloquent on almost every page of the futility of hoping

that the opinion (say) of a theorist of the sixteenth century will

7 Early Theories of Translation, by Flora Ross Amos, Ph.D., Assistant

Professor of English in the College for Women, Western Reserve University.

New York: Columbia University Press. (London: Humphrey Milford.)

1920. xvi + 184 pp. $2.00 net.

14

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

show any awareness of the notions of earlier men, or that it will meet the gaze to aid any theorist who may succeed him. The theorists indeed might utter their obiter dicta : they spoke into the wind. And least of all were they heeded by the actual practitioners of the art, who are apt to perform better than they know, inspired by other than technical motives. Even Chapman, though he has some theory to offer, seems unable to explain how and why his Iliads of Homer is so successful an experiment ; and the Preface to the Authorized Version at most only hints indirectly at the root-causes of the excellence of the greatest of all translations. But, of course, Dr. Amos has a perfect right to limit the range of her inquiry as she chooses ; and under a sort of self-denying ordinance, she has patiently collected and passed in review what there is in English of theory of translation down to the end of the age of Pope. It is convenient, to say the least, to have this scattered material brought between the boards of a single volume. Nor is it always dead-head wisdom that Dr. Amos brings from the past. She has a Dryden among her people, who, referring to Roscommon’s rules for translation, writes : ‘Many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation.’ And Dr. Amos, before quoting these words, had already made the same admission of the inadequacy of any theory to inspire, or even to explain, all that gives quality and distinction to the best translations. ‘For in translation there is involved enough of creation to supply the incalculable element which cheats the theorist.’

Mr. Omond’s name is well known among prosodists. He is one of a very few who can write upon English verse without turning ‘crank’. He has his views, and can express them tersely and with vigour enough ; but he rides no hobby-horse, for truth is dearer to him than a reputation for singularity. All the more welcome are the reprint of his Study of Metre,8 and the new edition of his English Metrists.9

8 A Study of Metre, by T. S. Omond. Reprinted from the first edition. London : Alexander Moring, Ltd., 1920. xvi + 159 pp. 7s. 6d.

9 English Metrists : being a sketch of English prosodical criticism from Elizabethan times to the present day, by T. S. Omond. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1921. viii + 336 pp. 10s. 6d. net.

The new issue of A Study of Metre is an exact reprint of the first edition, save for some ‘trifling verbal corrections’. Quotations and Swinburne, ‘Longinus’, Probus, and Lessing—all alike emphasize hearing as the court of appeal in questions of metre: and in keeping with this, a feature of Mr. Omond’s study is the regular deduction of theory, wherever possible, from consideration of examples. Its method alone will commend the book to the wise. Nor will its substance disappoint; for Mr. Omond at least simplifies the subject, and makes use of terms so explicit and so clearly defined that his meaning is never in doubt. The thesis maintained counters the view which seeks the basis of our metre in words or syllables. ‘All verse’, Mr. Omond argues, ‘is conditioned by time’; and what recurs with regularity to supply the basis sought is ‘the time-spaces or periods of duration in which syllables are, as it were, embedded’. ‘Temporal uniformity underlies syllabic variety.’ And so Mr. Omond supports the view that ‘isochronous periods form the units of metre. Syllabic variation gets its whole force from contrast with these, is conceivable only in relation to these’.

English Metrists recasts into one volume the two original parts of this work, published respectively in 1903 and 1907, and brings the record down to the end of 1920. The work offers a full bibliography of English writings on metre, summarizing and criticizing the contents of each. Books that contribute in Mr. Omond’s opinion to the development of sounder views about verse-structure receive fuller treatment at his hands. But no book, whatever its view, is unjustly reported. Nor does it appear that Mr. Omond has omitted anything of importance from his long list. English Metrists is a book that no future historian of our prosody can afford to ignore.

Professor Pound’s Poetic Origins and the Ballad10 contradicts the teaching of the late Professor Gummere and of ‘communal’ theorists generally. The point of view and the range of her book are given clearly in the opening sentence of her preface. ‘The leading theses of the present volume are that the following assump-

10 Poetic Origins and the Ballad, by Louise Pound, Ph.D., Professor of English in the University of Nebraska. New York :The Macmillan Co., 1921. x+247 pp. $2.50.

16

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

tions which have long dominated our thought upon the subject of

poetic origins and the ballads should be given up, or at least should

be seriously qualified ; namely, belief in the “communal” author-

ship and ownership of primitive poetry ; disbelief in tha primitive

artist ; reference to the ballad as the earliest and most universal

poetic form ; belief in the origin of narrative songs in the dance,

especially definition of the English and Scottish traditional ballad

type as of dance origin ; belief in the emergence of traditional

ballads from the illiterate, that is, belief in the communal creation

rather than re-creation of ballads; belief in the special powers of

folk-improvisation ; and belief that the making of traditional

ballads is a “closed account”. This attack upon doctrines that

have been developed since Child gave a new impetus to ballad-

study, but that very probably would not have found favour in his

sight, cannot be called surprising; for ingenious speculation and

extravagant inference have long injured the work of ‘communal’

theorists, and sufficed to bury from view any element of truth their

position may have held. Professor Pound, like some earlier

critics unheeded in their day, makes use of ballad ‘chronology’—

of the date of recovery or recording of ballads in manuscript or

print—as an argument for her side. But she rests far more upon

analogy with folk-song products that are known as such, whether

from the past or from the present; and the evidence she brings to

bear from ethnological and kindred researches is perhaps the

strongest and most valuable part of her book on its destructive side.

On its constructive side, the chapter on ‘The English Ballads and

the Church’ is perhaps the most interesting and worthy of attention.

Professor Pound here argues for an origin of balladry similar to

the origin of our drama. Her own summary of this new hypothe-

sis may be quoted. ‘The alternative possibilities (granting that

religious ballads are an early type) are : that short narrative lyrics

on ecclesiastical themes emerged directly from clericals and that the

type was later secularized ; or that they emerged from the minstrels,

and ecclesiastics availed themselves of the type ; or that minstrels

were solely responsible for the early religious ballads, composing

them for audiences for whom they were specially suitable. But

when lingering over these hypotheses, one is inclined to give the

church a greater share of responsibility for the earliest ballads than

the third hypothesis assumes.’ This suggestion, says the author,

'is based on fact, not conjecture'. Certainly it 'deserves to be taken into account, alongside the hypotheses of ballad origin which have been brought forward in the past'.—The disappointing side of Professor Pound's monograph is its form rather than its matter. The greater part of the book is a reprint (with modifications and additions) of papers that had already appeared in various periodical publications. And the author herself enters an apology for their 'polemical tone' which 'is to be accounted for by the fact that each was written to urge a distinctive point of view or to oppose some accepted position, i.e. was a piece of special pleading. It was impossible', she adds, 'to eliminate the argumentative note without re-writing the articles in toto.' It is a pity this extra labour was not undertaken, not merely for the sake of improving the tone, but to rid away a certain amount of overlapping and repetition that puts a drag at times upon the even flow and development of the argument. If it should prove that Professor Pound has not finally laid the ghost of the 'communal' theorist, the reason for her failure will be found to lie less in the spell she chose for that purpose than in her mode of pronouncing it.

If new histories of literature are difficult to produce and scarce in our day, no obstacle seems to check the flow of books and essays of general theorizing, especially about poetry. The tale of such requiring notice here is not yet ended. From Harvard we have A Study of Poetry, by Bliss Perry ; from Ireland, The Realm of Poetry, by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.; while Professor Herford contributes a paper entitled 'Is there a poetic view of the world?'

Professor Bliss Perry's volume11 depends in some degree from an earlier publication of its author's. The method of studying poetry here followed is that set forth some years ago in Professor Perry's chapter on 'Poetry' in Counsel upon the Reading of Books. The 'genetic' method, he calls it; and refers to its 'threefold process of impression, transforming imagination, and expression'. The aim seems to be to study poetry after the order of its creation; and this order, in Professor Perry's view, might eput as follows: a poem originates in an impression delivered upon a poet—this

11 A Study of Poetry, by Bliss Perry, Professor of English Literature in Harvard University. London: Constable. n. d. x+396 pp. 12s. 6d.

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LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

impression (whatever its nature or source) in its passage through

the mind of the poet suffers transformation under the force of his

imagination--expression is given to the impression thus trans-

formed and a poem results. Professor Perry believes that his

method is ‘the natural way of approaching the subject’. But he is

aware that insistence upon any one method with poetry--even his

—risks the danger of declining upon worship of a formula ; and

perhaps the title of his book reflects this in its unassuming use of

the article. A Study of Poetry certainly does not read like the

composition of a rigid ‘methodist’ or rule-monger. Arranged and

supplemented with material to fit it for use in the classroom--by

careful and perceiving instructors only, let us hope, for the book’s

sake--its general style and tone suggest a much wider appeal. To

the making of both parts of this study--to the first which discusses

‘Poetry in general’, and to the second which treats of ‘The Lyric

in particular’--there has gone a vast amount of reading. Indeed,

the desire to be up-to-date and full in reference to the ‘literature’

of his subject sometimes blunts the edge of our author’s pro-

nouncements ; and his hold upon his audience would perhaps have

been more uniformly strong if on occasion he could have allowed

the extent of his learning to remain in some doubt. But there is

another side to the account. Professor Perry is for all points of

the compass. And if he fetches cargoes from the critics of poetry,

he adventures as freely among the poets themselves, brightening

his pages with quotation and anecdote, as happy and illuminating

as they are various.

The Realm of Poetry by S. J. Brown 12 is a book on pretty

much the same subject as Professor Perry’s; but it is another

sort of book. Professor Perry ruffles it, quite pleasantly, in all

his robes, and talks by preference to those who know ; his desire

is to impart more knowledge. Mr. Brown puts on no ceremony,

and would as soon be telling his story to the first casual man he

should meet as to the most learned pundit : his aim is simply

to instil a taste, to give a bent to the mind and make it ripe for

the receipt of knowledge.

Mr. Brown’s book is in three parts, with a prologue and an

epilogue. His first step is to seek an answer to the question

12 The Realm of Poetry: an Introduction, by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.

London: Harrap. [1921.] 220 pp. 5s. net.

GENERAL WORKS

19

'What is Poetry?' The form, the subject-matter, and the spirit

of poetry are separately considered before he settles to the discus-

sion of some leading definitions of poetry, and to the framing of

a description of his own. This description 'aims at nothing more

than to be intelligible and, so to say, popular'; and to be appre-

ciated it should really be met in the body of the book. Yet it

may be quoted here as suggesting by its parts the author's inter-

pretation of the terms form, subject-matter, and spirit. 'Poetry',

we read, 'is the art which expresses in metrical and otherwise

fitting or congruous language, self, life, nature, God, and all their

interactions realized or apprehended in a mood of emotional and

imaginative exaltation.' It is apparent from this that Mr. Brown

considers metre essential to poetry: for the rest, even to the

implication that not all metring can be allowed as poetry, Sidney

would not have quarrelled with our author. Something suggestive

of Sidney also there is in his turning next after definition to reflect

upon the things that poetry can do for us—his second part. His

third part—'Learning to love Poetry'—is more practical still,

having to do with method, and indeed discussing in one section

'the systematic study of a poem'. The Epilogue is on 'The

"Mission" of Poetry', and gives occasion to challenge as exagge-

rated the claims of those who would have poetry independent of

morality or a religion in itself. But though we get exhortation,

it does not grow to homily: our author's care for poetry is a suffi-

cient check. Mr. Brown has made a book that should find grateful

readers among the teachers of literature for whom it is designed

—a book that talks at ease and affectionately about its theme;

and that reveals its author less as the schoolmaster of to-day

than as something which most of us have regretted as long lost

from the earth, the dominie who educated youth before the

days of specialization broke him up into half a dozen school-

masters.

Professor Herford's inquiry—'Is there a poetic view of the

world?' 13—is approached, perhaps unconsciously, by Mr. Brown.

'Dare we claim for poetry', he writes, 'that it may teach us a

13 In Shakespeare's Treatment of Love and Marriage, and other Essays, by

C. H. Herford, Honorary Professor of English Literature in the University

of Manchester. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [1921.] 201 pp. 10s. 6d. net.

(pp. 145-201.)

B 2

20

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

new attitude toward life as a whole, or at least toward a great part of our daily and hourly experience, an attitude that we may call the poetic outlook upon things, as contrasted with the 'practical.'

Professor Herford's 'poetic world-view' is something more particular, and contrasts with those we name religious and philosophical.

There is no question of establishing a sort of hierarchy of values, of setting one world-view above or below another. Professor Herford—noting that the religious and the philosophical conceptions of the world are founded in two distinct types of elemental experience—argues simply for the recognition of a 'third kind of experience, distinct from that of either religion or philosophy, yet involving an apprehension of reality comparable in originality, and possibly in importance, with theirs'; and claims that 'such an experience is given in and by poetry'. Poetic experience may seldom show pure, unaffected by religious or philosophical ideas, but it never fails to modify these. And by learned and subtle examination of the character or direction of these modifications in 'certain commanding poet natures', both ancient and modern, Professor Herford develops his thesis; and finds that the light which guides to a poetic view of the world is, in some form or other, 'the faith that spiritual energy is the heart of reality'.

Theories of fiction threaten to become as numerous as essays in poetics. Two books on the novel must be noticed here.

The Art of the Novelist, by Professor Lathrop,14 sits lightly to its title; but this will not damage it with the audience addressed. It is a book popular in design; 'meant for those who have unreflectively and sympathetically read so many novels that they have begun to think about them, who have lived within the realm of the story-teller long enough to have some standards and ideals of their own, but have not defined those standards and ideals and thought them out into clear consciousness'. To spread rather than to increase knowledge has been the author's aim, and both matter and style are according. With nothing very new to report, he can set out the knowledge of the virtuosi, in a way sufficiently fresh and individual to justify his claim to 'some authority as an

14 The Art of the Novelist, by Henry Burrowes Lathrop, Associate Professor of English in the University of Wisconsin. London: Harrap. [1921.] xii + 291 pp. 6s.

older soldier in speaking with his comrade readers'; and if at times he slips into the jargon of the hasty reviewer, his manner has perhaps more of the virtues than of the vices of fluency. No chapter is without something to attract and interest; the best perhaps, in which our author goes more beneath the surface, is that on 'Setting.'

In The Craft of Fiction 15 Mr. Percy Lubbock addresses a very different audience from Professor Lathrop's—a smaller audience, for certain; and an audience that has both read many novels and thought about them, till thought (it would appear) from over-exercise has taken a cramp.

It was Sydney Smith who declared that 'the main question as to a novel is—did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten, and twelve for eleven? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not—story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it.

It is only meant to please; and it must do that, or it does nothing.' But the game of novel-making has been played hotly since 1826; and readers of taste begin to grow shy of confessing their love so vulgarly as this.

Long ago they saw wrought the last of the 'permutations and combinations' possible with hero, heroine, and villain; and they cease, therefore, to be hypnotized by mere story, or by any of the conventional elements of story.

The élite of the novel-reading public, they would seek and praise in novels a more subtle beauty.

In the questions that define their approach to fiction, 'how' is like to supersede the more common 'what' or 'why'. Their cult is the cult of 'significant form'; and they would argue that in the novel, as in poetry—when indeed the argument has found able defenders—form is everything.

If Mr. Lubbock has not come out to meet this new and select company on its way, he has at least put on his coat and contemplates the journey.

For The Craft of Fiction is an essay that denies the existence among us of anything worthy the name of criticism of fiction, and that blames for this state of affairs our wrongheaded way of reading novels.

As readers, still more as critics of fiction, we must get rid of the habit of being most pleased when we can lose ourselves.

15 The Craft of Fiction, by Percy Lubbock. London: Jonathan Cape [1921]. [viii]+277 pp. 9s. net.

22

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

in the world of a novel. For this habit it is that diverts the criticism of fiction from its proper object, fobbing us off with discussion of 'the writer', of 'the people in his book', of 'the kind of life he renders, and his success in the rendering'—topics that are beside the mark altogether. 'So far from losing ourselves in the world of the novel, we must hold it away from us, see it all in detachment', that we may give our whole attention to forming an 'image' of 'the novel itself', of 'the book [as] an object of art.'

It is a difficult quest, this quest of 'the book'. If Mr. Lubbock succeeds in luring us to the undertaking, it is only by his command of a style that never fails to express his subtlest notion, and by the courage of his own despairing enthusiasm. 'And after all', he says towards the end, 'it is impossible—that is certain; the book vanishes as we lay hands on it. Every word we say of it, every phrase I have used about a novel in these pages, is loose, approximate, a little more or a little less than the truth. We cannot exactly hit the mark; or if we do, we cannot be sure of it. . . . Such an ingenuous confession, I think it must be admitted, goes to the root of the matter—could we utter our sense of helplessness more candidly?'

And yet The Craft of Fiction is neither more nor less than the demonstration of a way to achieve this 'impossible' quest: and the man who has nothing to learn from its pages, be he novelist or critic, is surely to be envied. 'The book' we would see may be a 'shadowy and fantasmāl form', something more air-drawn than the dagger in Macbeth. If we are ever to behold it we must learn to recreate our novel after its author: and the 'one obvious way' to this skill is 'to study the craft, to follow the process, to read constructively'. Small wonder that the quest inspires at once enthusiasm and despair. For the 'way' lends dignity at least to the critic: 'the reader of a novel—by which I mean the critical reader—is himself a novelist.' And Mr. Lubbock—pursuing this 'way' with the small handful of novels he selects from Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, and Henry James—if he seldom appears to capture his 'book', never fails at least to give one to think.

We may consider that Mr. Lubbock exaggerates when he says 'there is nothing more that can usefully be said about a novel until we have fastened upon the question of its making and

explored it to some purpose'-when he indicates the 'technical

aspect' of novels as 'the business of criticism in the matter of

fiction'. We may tax him also with assuming too readily that all

reading (especially of novels) is for the ends of criticism. Surely

he would concede that, if a Parson Adams or a Dugald Dalgetty

can upset the designs of a Fielding or a Scott, even the most

alert and cunning of readers may be excused for losing himself on

occasion in the world of a novel, counting it a gain to do so. But

quarrel as we may with the author of The Craft of Fiction, at the

very least we must admit that he supplies us with a legitimate and

not unprofitable gymnastic for the re-reading of a novel; and not

a few will welcome a study of technique that, with all its ingenious

subtleties, defines the 'form' it worships in terms of 'subject', and

that, unlike so much of contemporary criticism of fiction, bears

upon its pages the stamp of mind.

The Teaching of English in England.16 is a chapter in the

history of education and of educational theory deserving the special

attention of students of English. It reports upon the state of

English teaching in our schools of all grades and types, our

colleges, and our universities, commending or criticizing the aims

and conditions that advance or retard English study at the several

stages; and it advocates a policy of improvement and reform for

the future. The Committee responsible for this Report has gone

to work thoroughly, taking full advantage of its 'reference'. As

a consequence, though time and change may efface the novelty

of many a particular suggestion, the Report is likely to remain

memorable for its consideration of the principles that must under-

lie any scheme of national education—principles examined and

enunciated to support another memorable feature, the sweeping

claims advanced for English in our educational system. It is

hardly to be expected that the new doctrine in its fullness will find

ready acceptance in all quarters: prejudice and the love of

established routine are not to be thrust down in a day. But the

16 The Teaching of English in England:' being the Report of the Departmental

Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education to inquire into

the position of English in the educational system of England. London : His

Majesty's Stationery Office, 1921. xvi +394 pp. 1s. 6d. net.

24

LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORY

skill and eloquence with which the case for English is here put encourage the hope that we have heard the last of that cheap

scorn of the mother-tongue, which pronounced it valueless as a subject of study alike for knowledge and for discipline; while

they also render impossible anything less than a fully-reasoned opposition to any detail whatever that may appear unacceptable.

II

PHILOLOGY: GENERAL WORKS

[By Hilda M. R. Murray]

One of the most important among recent contributions to linguistic studies is Professor Jespersen’s Language : its Nature, Development and Origin,1 published at the turn of the year 1921–22, in which the author develops and formulates his ‘philosophy of speech’, already outlined in earlier works. In his introductory survey he shows how the great scholars of the nineteenth century revolutionized linguistic studies by the introduction of the historical point of view, and turned from the wider speculations of their predecessors on the origin of speech, and the comparative valuation of languages, to more specialized investigations of linguistic change and development; but the insistence on the ‘biological or bio-graphical’ conception of language as a living organism, and on the primary importance of its phonological and morphological developments, led to a tendency to think and speak of it as an abstraction, subject to ‘a dogma of blind sound-laws’, or as having a separate existence from the individuals who speak it. During the last thirty years the new attitude towards the study of the living speech inaugurated by Sweet has led to advances in linguistic science which bid fair to rival in importance those of the nineteenth century. The advance has been in the direction of humanizing the study of language, of considering it in its proper relation as a human function or activity. The study of phonetics has broken down abstract formulas of sound-change by insisting on the fact that ‘the real life of language is in the mouth and ear, not in the pen and eye’; and the old isolative study of single words and sounds has given place to the new combinative study of words in connected speech as seen in the attention now paid to sentence phonetics, sentence stress, and to the science of semantics. As Professor Jespersen points out, the controlling force in linguistic

1 Language: its Nature, Development and Origin, by O. Jespersen. London: Allen and Unwin. 8vo. 448 pp. 18s.

26

PHILOLOGY : GENERAL WORKS

development is the need for intelligibility, which acts as a check

upon the tendency of the individual towards changeability of

speech-habits. ‘Linguistic biology’ is dealt with in the second

and third sections of the book, which examine respectively the

speech of children, and particularly the way in which a child

learns to talk, as bearing upon the life and development of

language; the influence of foreigners; and the part which indivi-

duals, or specific classes of individuals in general, play in lin-

guistic development. The author holds that linguistic development

is as a rule in the direction of economy of effort, and points out

that no valid distinction can be drawn between phonetic and non-

phonetic changes, since analogy (economy of brain) exercises in

morphology an influence parallel to that exercised by ease (economy

of effort) in sound-change.

The final section deals with the author's general conclu-

sions. The 'energetic' view of language as a human activity

leads inevitably to the valuation of languages from an anthropo-

centric point of view. Linguistic development is progressive since

it is, in the main, in the direction of economy of effort, and that

language must rank highest which accomplishes most with the

minimum of effort. The old theories of linguistic decay ignore

the superior flexibility of analytic modes of expression as contrasted

with the rigidity of synthetic forms. Thus the logical simplicity

of Modern English syntax, in which word-order has taken the

place of grammatical inflexion, may well be contrasted with the

greater rigidity and the complicated inflexional systems of the

classical languages. In conclusion it is shown how the study of

the linguistic development of the child and the individual, and the

progress of languages in general, throw light on the problem of

the ultimate origin of speech, which Professor Jespersen assumes

to have begun with phrase- or sentence-units in which tone played

an important part, rather than with words or roots. In his own

words, ‘the evolution of language shows a progressive tendency

from inseparable irregular conglomerations to freely and regularly

combinable short elements’.

It is impossible in so small a compass to give an adequate idea

of the mass of material contained in this interesting and suggestive

book. The author advances a sound and consistent theory of

linguistic change and development, considered from the humane .

PHILOLOGY : GENERAL WORKS

27

point of view in relation to the combinative use of language as

a means of intercourse and to the actual practice of individual

speakers, presenting it in a readable form and compass which may

well commend it to a wider circle than that of the professed linguist,

while at the same time he suggests many new fields for the

investigation of the latter. His theory inevitably leads him to

attack wider and more speculative issues of a more controversial

type, but the] treatment throughout is suggestive and unprejudiced,

and his conclusions are the logical outcome of his anthropocentric

standpoint.

The practical bearing of the new attitude towards language on

the learning of languages is seen in Mr. Palmer's Principles of

Language-Study.2 Mr. Palmer, like Professor Jespersen, considers

language as a human function or habit, and the fundamental

principle of his book is that language-learning is a habit-forming

process, an art, not a science, and that the natural or spontaneous

method, illustrated by the child learning to speak, is consequently

far more successful than the studial. Further, since language is

'not an agglomeration of word-units but a means of communicating

thoughts', the memorized matter should consist, as with the child,

of ergons or speech-units, not of isolated word-units which are

incapable of serving as a basis of combinative or constructed

matter. Thus Mr. Palmer gives a practical application of the

changed attitude towards language indicated by the importance

attached to phonetics, and by the stress laid on the combinative

view of language and on the value of child-study for linguistic

purposes. His examination of methods and of the rational order

of progression in practical language-study is sound and helpful in

its discrimination between spontaneous and studial methods, and

its suggestion of the right compromise between the direct and the

indirect, and his exposition of the underlying principles of language-

study will be of value to many students.

In his Inaugural Lecture,3 delivered at Oxford in February 1921,

Professor Wyld pleads for a more living and fruitful study of

2 The Principles of Language-Study, by H. E. Palmer. London : Harrap.

8vo. 186 pp. 6s.

3 English Philology in English Universities. Inaugural Lecture by H. C.

Wyld. Oxford University Press. 46 pp. 2s. 6d.

28

PHILOLOGY: GENERAL WORKS

philology at English Universities, pointing out how live and

progressive a branch of learning the study of the living speech

should be and what new fields of research await the trained band

of young scholars whom it should be the work of the Universities

to send out. In Professor Wyld's opinion this can best be done

by the division of the old double-barrelled course of Language and

Literature in such a way as to leave the specialist free to devote

himself to one or the other branch, and to bring his studies into

vital relation with the most progressive thought of the day.

Professor Weekley's Etymological Dictionary of Modern English 4

includes 'the whole of the literary and colloquial vocabulary, so far

as the former is not purely archaic and the latter not purely

technical or local'; and may therefore justly claim to be the most

complete dictionary of our modern usage in existence. It is

offered 'to those lovers of our language who, without wishing to

stumble about in the dim regions which produce prehistoric roots

and conjectural primitive-Teutonic word-forms, have an educated

interest in words and an intelligent curiosity as to their origins

and earlier senses'. To satisfy this intelligent curiosity the author

has spread his net widely, admitting foreign words likely to occur

in reading or conversation, proper names which come within the

scope of historical or etymological interest, recent neologisms and

war vocabulary, in so far as any of these categories have general

currency or usage. A further new departure is the extension of

the term 'etymology' to cover any points of interest in the history

of a word, such as how, when, why, or by whom it was first

introduced into the language, points which may well be of greater

interest to the curious mind than the question of its ultimate

provenance. Thus this dictionary is in a sense a dictionary of

phrase and fable, and contains much delightful and curious reading,

not only in its 'etymological' matter, but in the quotations, which

have been selected for illustration in the same catholic spirit as the

rest of the material. A number of interesting and independent

solutions of etymological problems are also included. The book

provides a valuable record of and commentary upon the present

usage in literary and colloquial English, and ably justifies this

4 An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, by E. Weekley. London :

Murray. xx + 1659 pp. 42s.

PHILOLOGY : GENERAL WORKS

29

further adventure of its author in the realms of the romance of

words.

Professor A. Heusler, in his inaugural address at Bâle on

Northern Antiquities in their relation to West Germanic,5 advocates

the study of Scandinavian antiquities from the point of view

of their importance for Germanic studies in general. Thus the

Norse runic inscriptions throw light also on the development of

the other Germanic languages ; northern mythology on the primi-

tive religion of the Germanic peoples in general ; and early

Scandinavian literature not only on their alliterative verse and

common stock of heroic studies but also on their social life and

customs. The evidence is clearly and concisely brought together

in a brief and scholarly survey of the subject.

The literary and cultural relations of England and Scandinavia

from their earliest beginnings up to the close of the Middle Ages

form the subject of the sixth volume of Harvard Studies in Com-

parative Literature.6 The author surveys the channels of inter-

course established by the Scandinavian settlements in England and

the subsequent relations between the peoples, and deals at length

with their literary relations as traced by him in epic and romance,

in books of instruction, and in popular legend and ballad up to

the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A ‘hypothetical chart’ of

foreign romances in Scandinavia is appended to the volume.

Professor Leo Wiener continues his attempt to overthrow ‘the

whole structure of Germanic history, philology, and palaeo-

graphy’ in two further volumes of his studies in Arabico-Gothic

culture,7 in which he attributes the Gothic and Runic alphabets,

Ulfilas, Jordane’s History of the Goths, and Tacitus’ Germania to

‘wholesale literary and documentary frauds’ of the eighth and

ninth centuries on the part of the Goths in Spain, and the Greeks

following in their wake. Professor Wiener attemps to prove the

5 Das nordische Altertum in seiner Beziehung zum west-germanischen, by

A. Heusler. Herrig’s Archiv, vol. 42 (n.s.). pp. 161-172. Berlin, 1921.

6 Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, by H. G. Leach. xi + 452 pp. 12mo.

Harvard University Press, London : Humphrey Milford. 15s. net.

7 Contributions towards a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture ; iii. Tacitus’

Germania and other Forgeries; iv. Physiologus Studies, by Leo Wiener.

Philadelphia : Innes & Sons, 1921. 328 and 388 pp.

30

PHILOLOGY : GENERAL WORKS

fraudulent nature of all references to the Crimean Goths, and to

show that the term Visigothi or Vestgothi implied merely Spanish

Goths trading as silk merchants (vestiarii) in Russia, whereas

Ostrogothi signified orientals, not Crimean Goths. Tācitūs' Ger-

mania he regards as an elaboration of Caesar's De Bello Gallico.

The whole theory presents an amazing story of frauds comparable

only to those which some hold Bacon to have perpetrated in the

works of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans.

Among new editions of important works may be mentioned the

fifth edition of Paul's Principles of Language,8 and the third

edition of his Dictionary,9 both revised shortly before the author's

death. The Principles of Language shows little change, but

the Dictionary has been much expanded both in words and in

the addition of quotations, though the adoption of Roman type

has spared much addition to the actual bulk of the volume.

A second edition of Jespersen's Engelsk Fonetik10 has been care-

fully revised, particularly in the treatment of the sections on Tone

and Stress. The year 1921 also witnessed the completion of

Jakobsen's Etymological Dictionary of the Norse Language,11 and

the continuation of Luick's Historical English Grammar.12 An

interesting article on the origin and history of the pronoun she

appears in the Anglia (January 1921).13

[By LILIAS E. ARMSTRONG]

In their Manual of Modern Scots14 Mr. W. Grant and Dr. Main

Dixon appear as jealous guardians of the ancient national speech

8 Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, by Hermann Paul. 5te Auflage. Halle :

Niemeyer. 42 mark.

9 Deutsches Wörterbuch. 3e Auflage. Halle : Niemeyer. 105 mark.

10 Engelsk Fonetik, by O. Jespersen. 2. udg. Copenhagen: Gyldendalke

Boghandel. 6 kr. 35.

11 Etymologisk Ordbog over det norrøne Sprog pa Shetland, by Jakob Jakobsen.

Copenhagen : V. Prior, 1908-21. 4te Heft, pp. 723-1032 + xlviii. 15s.

12 Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, by Karl Luick. Lieferung

3 to 6. i. Leipzig : Tauchnitz. 15 mark.

13 On the Origin and History of the English Pronoun She, by H. Lindkvist-

Anglia, XLV. i. (n. f. xxxiii), Jan. 1921. -Halle: Niemeyer.

14 Manual of Modern Scots, by W. Grant and Main Dixon. pp. xxii + 500.

Cambridge University Press, 1921. 20s. net.

PHILOLOGY : GENERAL WORKS

31

of Scotland. They regard as traitors those Scotsmen who are unfaithful to it and who basely write Anglified Scots or Scottified English. In a chapter on the ‘Intrusion of English into Scots’, they urge that Scottish writers shall pay attention to the history of their language, its literature, its grammar, and that the study of the old national speech shall be fostered in the schools and colleges of Scotland.

The Manual of Modern Scots is an attempt to give to those lovers of Scottish literature—presumably of all nationalities—who have ‘few or no opportunities of hearing the language in its spoken form’, the power to enjoy the spoken language through the medium of their own voice. The writers hope that with the help of sections I and II (phonetics and grammar) the student will be able to read or recite the extracts given in section III with a pronunciation ‘which would be recognized as Scottish wherever it is spoken’. It would be interesting to know what degree of perfection must be reached before this is possible.

In the first part of the book—Phonetics—the consonant and vowel sounds are described, and numerous examples are given of their occurrence in Standard Scots, and of variations from this standard found in many Scottish dialects. The examples are written in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association ; Scottish and English conventional spelling are also given. This section of the book is more generously treated than the corresponding one in The Pronunciation of English in Scotland, published by Mr. Grant in 1913; the examples are more numerous, and points of historical interest are introduced.

The second section deals with the grammar of Modern Scots, and numbers of very interesting examples from modern Scots writers are used as illustrations of the differences between Scottish and English usage.

More than half the book consists of a phonetic reader containing extracts from the masterpieces of modern writers and a selection of favourite ballads and songs. One extract gives a faithful record of the Scotch of the Glasgow working man (Wee Macgregor); another of the dialect of the North-east (Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk); another of that of Galloway and Nithsdale (Galloway Gossip); another of the Teviotdale dialect of fifty years ago (from the story of Ruth). But the majority of the passages chosen record

32

PHILOLOGY: GENERAL WORKS

that type of pronunciation which is regarded by the writers as

Standard Scots and which is used by the educated middle classes

over a large area of mid-Scotland.

The texts should be welcomed as much by those students of

Scottish literature who do enjoy opportunities of hearing the

spoken language as by those for whom they are chiefly intended,

namely, those readers of Scottish literature scattered in all parts

of the world who have little or no opportunities of hearing the

language. We are inclined to think, however, that non-Scottish

students would require a greater knowledge of phonetics than they

can obtain from this book, together with help from the voice of a

Scottish teacher, before they could succeed in reading or reciting

the passages well enough to please the writers.

A work of this kind, treating of some of the more important

forms of English and of a number of definite sub-dialects, would

be a welcome addition to those publications in phonetic script

already in existence which deal with the pronunciation of English

in England.

III

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

[By Edith E. Wardale]

The outstanding book for the year 1920–21 which deals with Old English is undoubtedly Dr. Chambers’ Introduction to his revised edition of Wyatt’s Beowulf, published in 1914.1 No work of such scope has yet appeared upon that fine old Epic. Dr. Chambers’ volume surveys the field of our present knowledge and adds much that is new. His studies of the stories of Offa and Finn are of special value in this respect, and his work may be said to form a landmark in the history of research on Beowulf.

In the first of the four parts into which the book is divided, Dr. Chambers deals with the evidence afforded by Latin and Scandinavian documents for the historical element in the story and examines their value. In Part II he gives the documents themselves. From this it becomes clear that there can no longer be any doubt of the historical origin of nearly all the chief personages introduced, however much their characters may have been modified in transition, and that it is therefore to the less essential figures, such as those of Offa and Finn, that the critic is now free to turn his attention.

After his survey of the historical element in the poem Dr. Chambers passes on to give and discuss the views held by different scholars on that which is not historical, and then to consider the other general questions which have been raised in connexion with Beowulf, the Scandinavian or English origin of the poem, its language, metre, and structure, and the position to be assigned to the Christian element in it. The Scandinavian stories (with translations added) which go back to the same widely-spread folk-tale as that of Grendel and the Hag, are given in Part II.

1 Beowulf: an Introduction, by R. W. Chambers. Cambridge University Press. xii + 417 pp. 30s.

1922

c

34

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

Dr. Chambers himself is inclined to ascribe the figure of the hero Bēowulf entirely to the folk-tale element, or to allow it only the slightest of historical backgrounds. He points out that, not only is his name, which is very rare at any time, nowhere mentioned in any historical or semi-historical document, but that it does not alliterate with those of the royal family of the Gēats, to which he is represented as belonging, and that the whole episode, apart from the superhuman element, is inherently improbable. It is not likely that the Gēat kingdom would have suddenly lost its independence after the long and prosperous rule of a great king; that loss is far more likely to have been the result of the overthrow of his incapable predecessor, Heardrēd. Dr. Chambers accepts Panzer's identification of the folk-tale to which Bēowulf and its Scandinavian parallels go back, with that of the 'Bear's Son', which is found scattered over Europe and Asia; and later in Part IV he discusses that story in greater detail.

To folk-tale also Dr. Chambers ascribes the figure of Thrȳtho, the wicked queen of Offa, though he connects it with a different story from that suggested by Miss Rickert in The Old English Offa-Saga. The general association of the wife of Offa the Second with the historical Cynethryth of the Saxon Chronicle, cannot, he thinks, be accepted. If the Offa episode belongs to the original poem, as language and metre would prove, the relative dates make it impossible, and moreover the character of Thrȳtho as represented in the Chronicle bears no resemblance to that of thevirago of Bēowulf. The account of her in the Vitae Duorum Offarum is probably a later modification with a definite purpose.

In connexion with this subject must be mentioned the reproductions of the five clever illustrations of the story of Offa in the MS. of the above-mentioned Vitae (MS. Cotton Nero D. I), in the British Museum, which are here made generally accessible for the first time, and add very greatly to the attractions of this valuable study.

Another point in which Dr. Chambers differs from the now general view is in his interpretation of the term 'Scyld Scēfing'. He considers that the historian William of Malmesbury must here be looked on as the sounder authority than the old poem, and that his version, 'Scyld son of'Scēaf', must be the right one, Scēaf being originally a culture god, emblematic of harvest. This

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

35

view he illustrates by interesting descriptions of the honour paid to

the sheaf in various countries and at different times.

Part III is occupied by a detailed study of the story of Finn as

told in Bēowulf and the Finnsburg Fragment, and an interpretation

of that difficult episode in the light of what is known of early

Germanic laws and customs. Whether one agrees with all

Dr. Chambers' conclusions or not, this chapter is one of great

interest and value. Part IV consists of a series of studies on

points of detail which, in some cases, go further into subjects

already discussed. The volume ends with a full Bibliography and

an Index.

Besides the series of illustrations from the life of Offa, already

mentioned, other interesting illustrations are a plan of Leire in the

seventeenth century, reproductions of two Viking ships, a map of

Southern Scandinavia in the sixth century, and examples of an

Old English helmet with its boar crest, and of two Ring-swords.

From this study of the sources and composition of our great

national epic we pass on to the translation of the poem itself by

Captain Scott-Moncrieff.2

This, which has been preceded by a translation of the Song of

Roland by the same author, is a bold attempt to reproduce in

Modern English the Old English poems Widsith, Bēowulf, Finns-

burg, Waldere, and Dēor, keeping, as far as possible, the old

vocabulary and metre. Short arguments of the poems precede

the translations, and notes follow, explanatory of meanings or

allusions, for some of which the author acknowledges indebted-

ness to Dr. Chambers' Widsith, a Study of OE. Heroic Legend.

These notes will be found helpful for interpretation and suggestive

for appreciation. To render verse of one language into verse of

another is always difficult, but when the original belongs to a date

at which thought, mode of expression, and structure of the language

were at a very different stage from that of the present day, the

difficulty is increased a hundredfold. It is almost impossible to

give a sustained impression of the rhythm of the line throughout

a poem of the length and character of Bēowulf, without at times

forcing the translation and thus falsifying the mode of expression

2

Bēowulf. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, with an Introduction by

Viscount Northcliffe. Chapman & Hall. xxvi+127. 7s. 6d. net.

c 2

36

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

or the thought. Captain Scott-Moncrieff is therefore seen at his

best in the shorter poems or in certain passages of Bēowulf. He

has succeeded in keeping one essential characteristic of Old English

poetic diction, the use of the compound word, such as ‘swan-road’

for the sea ; ‘foamy-necked floater’ for a ship ; ‘battle-gleamer’ for

the sword, and others, which require to be taken in their context

to be appreciated. He has also succeeded in conveying much of

the vigour and movement of the story, and many of his lines are

very happily rendered. In others, the almost insuperable difficulty,

already spoken of, in translating a phrase from an inflected into an

uninflected language has hampered him. Still, whatever criticism

may be made, this translation is to be welcomed as an attempt to

stimulate interest in our older literature, by thus bringing it within

the reach of a wider public. It should be successful in this.

The next work to be considered leads us into an entirely different

sphere of Anglo-Saxon study. Professor Max Foerster’s very able

article, Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen,3 was contributed to the

Texte und Forschungen zur Englischen Kulturgeschichte : Festgabe

für Felix Liebermann. In it the author restricts himself for want

of space to the Celtic element introduced into Old English. He

begins by emphasizing the necessity (too often overlooked, he

thinks) of distinguishing two series of borrowings, the earlier and

larger set of words borrowed by the Angles and Saxons from the

conquered Britons, and a second smaller set learnt from the Irish

missionaries. While the first set have to do with the affairs of

everyday life and the Keltic skill in metal-work, and consist largely

of the names of animals and tools, the second are learned borrowings

connected chiefly with the monastic life, and consisting of theological

terms and the like. This distinction is well illustrated later, when

the author goes on to examine in detail the chief words of each

class. Professor Foerster considers that these two divisions are

adequate since the words, though not recorded till later, must

have been borrowed between the fifth and seventh centuries. At

that time, though important linguistic changes were going on,

dialectal distinctions between the forms of the language spoken by

the Kelts of Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany were so slight that the

3 Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen. Eine sprachliche Untersuchung, von

Max Foerster. Halle (Saale). Max Niemeyer. 128 pp.

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

37

common original can be reconstructed, and for this he uses the

term ‘Old-British’ as distinct from the earlier and wider term

‘Primitive Keltic’.

Modern criticism has considerably diminished the number of

words in Old English which used to be assigned to a Keltic origin.

Professor Foerster would cut the list still shorter. For example,

he connects cradol with the Old High German ‘chratto, chrezzo’,

a basket, rather than with a Keltic root to rock. The cradles of

those days were not, as far as may be gathered from the one repre-

sentation preserved, made to be rocked! Other words whose

Keltic origin he doubts are denu, a valley ; denn, a den ; and dūn,

a down, for which neither form nor meaning, he thinks, justifies

a connexion with the Keltic dūn, a fortified place. Gafol, tribute,

cannot be Keltic, but must be from the stem of the verb to give.

Professor Foerster passes on to show that the same distinction

between those of British and those of Irish origin, must also be

made in the case of proper names. This is clearly to be seen in

the names in the Liber Vitae Dunelmensis. He divides up proper

names into large classes of (a) early family names, such as Howel ;

(b) patronymics, such as Ap Howel, the modern Powell ; and

(c) names of local origin, such as Cair Riu, the castle of the hill,

the modern Carew, and smaller classes of those names taken from

some personal characteristic, such as Coch, red, the modern Gough,

and yet more rarely from occupation.

Finally comes a short chapter on Place-Names. Very noticeable

among Professor Foerster’s examples of the many modern names

of Keltic origin is the large number of those beginning with Cad-,

Chad-, Cat-, Chat-, such as Cadman, Chadwick, Cadogan, Catton,

Chatsworth, or with the abbreviated patronymic p-, b-, such as

Price, Prichard, Parry, Barry, Bevan.

A work of considerable scope which has appeared this year is

Die Mythologischen Ausdrücke im altenglischen Wortschatz,4 by

Herr Richard Jente, Instructor in German in the University of

Minnesota. In this work the author has put together the evidence

afforded by the Old English vocabulary concerning the native beliefs

4 Die Mythologischen Ausdrücke im altenglischen Wortschatz. Eine kultur-

geschichtlich-etymologische Untersuchung, von Richard Jente. Anglistische

Forschungen. Heft 56. xx + 344 pp. Mk. 26.40.

38

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

and religious customs of the Anglo-Saxons. For this purpose he considers words as they occur in compounds or independently, including those such as Frīge found only in the compounds Frīgedæg, &c. He also makes much use of personal and place-names. Additional value is given by the short discussion of the etymology of each word in order to bring out the general conceptions behind the definite terms. Thus the original meanings of the words for 'god', 'soul', 'spirit', and of many others are discussed.

Herr Jente deals first with the external aspects of worship, with the information to be gained as to the functions of the priesthood, the nature of the temples, and with the question of the use of idols. He comes to the conclusion that at the time of their conversion to Christianity the Anglo-Saxons had a regular hierarchy of priests and temples built of wood, in which were placed idols, and that their formal worship must have consisted of song, dance, and sacrifice, since all these things are mentioned to be forbidden in later Christian laws. From these considerations he passes on to that of the gods and goddesses who can be proved to have been thus worshipped. A very interesting chapter follows next, dealing with the conception of the supernatural as shown in the belief in the soul, in a future life, and in good and bad spirits of all kinds.

Herr Jente assumes that besides the higher forms of worship mentioned above, the older, more primitive forms originally held round some natural object, such as a tree or stone, or in a grove, long survived, and may be traced in later superstitions. He thinks, for instance, that the early belief, that the soul passed at death into the wind, is the source of the story told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the ghostly hunting parties heard by the monks and others between Peterborough and Stamford in the spring of the year 1127, and represents the 'Wilde Jagd' of German legend.

Further chapters of great interest are those treating of the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards fate and death, and with their practice of magic.

It is obvious that the subject-matter of the various chapters must to some extent overlap, and that there must be a certain amount of repetition in the book, but Herr Jente has collected much useful material in dealing with his obscure and difficult subject.

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

39

In Das Problem des Flexionsschwundes im ags,5 Herr Hübener gives us a contribution to the history of English syntax.

The author here follows up his earlier article, ‘Zur Erklärung der Wortstellungsentwicklung im ags’.

His object is to prove that the loss of inflexions in English is the result of the gradual fixing of the word-order, and not as usually explained, the cause, and that the general introduction of prepositions and conjunctions followed.

The writer therefore rejects earlier theories, such as that of Jespersen, that the loss of inflexion was due to the introduction of the foreign element into the language, showing that this loss had begun before any great number of French or Scandinavian words are found.

Here he overlooks the fact that Scandinavian words must have been in the spoken language long before they appear in literature, and that they would have been borrowed in the very district in which inflexions first began to fall, i. e. in the North.

Herr Hübener also rejects the commonly-given explanation that the loss of inflexions was the inevitable result of the Germanic Accent Law, or that it was due to the greater use of prepositions and conjunctions.

He points out that though such linkwords were undoubtedly used in Old English, it was only with restricted meanings ; they are not found in general use till the Middle English period.

He works out his own theory by tracing the development of word-order from early OE. texts, such as Genesis ‘A’ and Beowulf, through the works of Aelfred and the later entries in the Peterborough Chronicle down to the Sawles Warde and the Ancren Riwle.

He shows by means of many statistics that the position of the verb was gradually changing during the whole of that time.

It was getting moved back more and more frequently from its position at the end of the sentence to one nearer the subject.

In the writings of Aelfred, even in principal sentences, it is found almost as often immediately after the subject as at the end of the sentence ; in dependent sentences the end position is yet rarer.

But inflexions are still intact.

Hence the loss of inflexion did not precede fixed word-order.

Later, as the end position of the verb became rarer, less importance was attached to inflexions and they were dropped.

In a language in which the thought is not

5 Das Problem des Flexionsschwundes im ags. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Bd. 45. Heft 1, p. 85. 17 pp.

40

ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

completely expressed till the end of the sentence brings the verb (gespannte Wortstellung), inflexion is important and therefore retained, but in a language in which the principal parts of a sentence may come earlier (lose Wortstellung) inflexion is neglected, and it is to this psychological factor that the loss of inflexion in English is due.

Lastly, Old English texts themselves are represented by Mr. Crawford's scholarly edition of the Examcron Anglice.6

The first part of the work is an Introduction, in which the editor begins with a description of the various MSS. which exist of the Exameron, their dates, phonological, orthographical, and grammatical features, and the relationship between them. He then goes on to examine the evidence for Aelfric's authorship, which he considers fully proved by similarity with his other works in vocabulary, syntax, style (it is in the same metrical prose as some of his sermons), method of using his sources, and lastly by his references to his other writings.

Mr. Crawford next considers the sources used; and decides that the Hexameron of St. Basil may have been one, but that the English version can in no sense be called a translation of that of St. Basil.

Part II contains the text itself with a translation; variants are given, and the theory of Aelfric's authorship is illustrated by the addition of parallel passages from his acknowledged works.

6 Examcron Anglice or the Old English Hexameron. Ed. by S. J. Crawford, M.A., B.Litt., Professor of English Philology in the Madras Christian College. Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, X. Band. Hamburg. Henri Grand, 1921. 85 pp. 30 Mks.

IV

MIDDLE ENGLISH

[By Margaret L. Lee]

Two general observations may be made in regard to the year's work of this section; first, that in the majority of cases the purpose of the modern author or editor has been literary, social, or historical rather than linguistic; secondly, that an unusually large proportion of the books considered deal with matter belonging to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Mr. Sisam's volume of extracts from fourteenth-century writers forbids any narrow definition of the nature of its appeal. In it we seem to possess what has so long been lacking to the student of late Middle English—an altogether excellent ecollection of representative pieces.

Anthologies culled from Old and Middle English literature have hitherto tended to emphasize the philological value of the passages chosen, at the expense of literary interest (Professor Cook's Literary Middle English Reader (1915) is a noteworthy exception, but has little in the way of textual annotation.) Mr. Sisam's collection, on the contrary, is so edited as to appeal both to linguistic and literary scholarship, and this in itself implies a high level of attainment. The Introduction, a delightful piece of critical prose, deals with the growth of romance and of new metrical forms during the thirteenth century, thus leading on to a detailed study of the fourteenth century, with its alliterative revival on the one hand, its fresh tide of foreign influence on the other, and its development of a new literary type, the Miracle Play. The discussion of the Middle English didactic or moral poem leads to an interesting digression, meant to prove that the large

1 Fourteenth-Century Verse and Prose, ed. by K. Sisam. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. xxxiii + 264 + App. 27 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

42

MIDDLE ENGLISH

proportion of such poems among existing MSS. is inconclusive,

since 'up to Chaucer's day, the greater the popularity of an English

poem, the less important becomes the MS. as a means of early

transmission. To determine the relative popularity of the longer

tales in verse we need, not so much a catalogue of extant MSS.

as a census, that cannot now be taken, of the repertoires of the

entertainers.'

In a concluding section Mr. Sisam provides some hints on the

study of early literature which should be of real benefit to students.

The need for intensive plus discursive reading, and of a 'sensitive'

attitude towards the writings dealt with, has seldom been so much

as referred to in the ordinary text-book, which is apt to assume

a finished scholarship on the part of the untrained student. Mr.

Sisam writes as a teacher no less than a man of letters, and his

point of view is broadly humanistic.

The scheme of the book excludes selections from Chaucer, 'who

suffers when read in extracts . . . although without him fourteenth-

century literature is a body without a head'. The point is debate-

able ; but if it be conceded, the choice of pieces leaves little room

for criticism. Robert Manning, Richard Rolle, Langland, Man-

deville, Barbour, Wiclif, Gower, Trevisa, and Minot are the chief

individual authors represented, and there are plentiful extracts

from the anonymous West Midland alliterative poems, the lyrics,

and the York and Towneley plays. Each extract is introduced by

a few clear paragraphs of general information, and elucidated by

several pages of notes which fulfil the double function of exciting

interest in subject-matter and in form. The volume includes an

Appendix of nearly thirty pages on the English Language in the

fourteenth century, so compact and suggestive as to constitute an

altogether admirable introduction to the study of Middle English

from the linguistic point of view; and (in the later edition) a

Vocabulary, which is also issued separately for purchasers of the

book in its earlier form.2 It is unfortunate that this separate issue

is unpaged, and that it should be entitled a Vocabulary on the cover

and a Glossary within. But these small points do not obscure the

fact that Mr. Tolkien has worthily completed a piece of work which

can hardly be praised too highly by teachers whom experience has

2 A Middle English Vocabulary, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1922. (Not paged). 4s. 6d. net.

brought to realize the underlying unity of all literary and linguistic

study worthy of the name.

Mr. Tolkien gives 'exceptionally full treatment to what may

rightly be`called the backbone of the language', e.g. he devotes

much space and care to the various meanings of the preposition to,

and the various forms of the pronoun he, or the verb hebben,

rather than to suggested etymologies of the rare and obscure words

contained in his texts. The result is a Vocabulary with exhaustive

textual references, having a value independent of the extracts to

which it is appended—comparable indeed in fullness and interest

with Heyne's Glossary to Bēowulf and a few others like it. The

treatment of convertible symbols such as 3 and g, þ and th, u and

v, i and y, is particularly to be commended.

We hope that future editions of Fourteenth-Century Verse and

Prose will be printed on more opaque paper, on which students

could insert their own marginal annotations in ink.

It is doubtful whether a thoroughly good collection or pieces

such as the one just considered, or a finely-edited example of the

best that a Middle English writer could produce, forms the more

desirable introduction to a study of the period. Of the latter class

of work we have a specimen in Sir I. Gollancz's Pearl,3 a labour

of love summarizing the fruit of many years' patient investigation.

The editor regards 'this early In Memoriam' as based un-

doubtedly upon a personal experience, its scheme 'elaborated from

the one thought of the transfiguration of the child'.

Uniting as it does the influences of Scripture and of Romance,

of the courtly and the native poetic schools, its artistic value is

unique, and so is its significance for the future development of

English poetry. Many points of interest are touched upon in the

Introduction to the text: the approximation of two sister arts,

shown alike in the 'brilliancy of colour and richness of description'

of the poem itself, and in the illustrations, here reproduced, which

adorn the fourteenth-century MS.; the possible connexion with

Boccaccio's Olympia, a similar lament for a young daughter; the

3 Pearl, edited, with modern Rendering, Introduction, Notes, and Glossary,

together with Boccaccio's Olympia, by Sir I. Gollancz, Litt.D., F.B.A.

London, Chatto & Windus, 1921. xliv + 285 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

44

MIDDLE ENGLISH

vexed problem of authorship ; and the relation of Pearl to the

other three important poems of the West Midland group.

The notes supplied by Professor Gollancz are no less interesting

to the general reader than helpful to the serious student. There is

also an adequate glossary, greatly improving upon that of a previous

edition ; and the Appendix, introducing and translating Boccaccio's

eclogue, gives the book a special value for those who find in

parallel expressions of fundamental human feeling a convincing

proof of the brotherhood of man.

A treatment of Sir Thomas Malory's great book is presented by

Miss V. Scudder 4 as the outcome of fifteen years' study with

college classes. Admirable work has been done on the subject

long since by Dr. Oskar Sommer, whose elaborate tables have

been used by Miss Scudder as a basis for her own discussion.

But Sommer's scholarship is of the strictly analytic and emen-

datory type which appeals only to the like-minded, whereas

Miss Scudder has aimed at a popular presentation suited to the

less erudite reader.

The arrangement of the book is business-like. Part I deals with

Malory's predecessors—early Arthurian romance in Britain, French

verse and prose romances, the development of the Merlin and

Lancelot stories, and the romances of the Middle English period.

In Part II we have, first, a study of Malory the man, and then

a detailed analysis of his great work, the sources of which, together

with certain aspects of Malory as philosopher and artist, are

discussed in Part III.

The spirit in which Miss Scudder approaches her subject may

be gathered from certain passages in the chapter entitled Pre-

liminaries :

The most fascinating work is the investigation of sources.

It leads back and back, till behind Geoffrey's Arthur fighting

the giant of Mont S. Michel rise all mythic heroes who have

slain monsters of darkness, and the traits of Morgan le Fay are

explained by her kinship to the Valkyrie, or the Irish war-

goddess, the Morrigu. It is in Keltic myth and legend that the

4 Le Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, by Vida D. Scudder. London

& Toronto : Dent & Sons, 1921. iv +407 pp., with Bibliography, 7 pp.

10s. 6d. net.

richest suggestions are found ; yet the mind is impelled to peer

toward yet farther horizons ; Guenevere borne away by Melia-

grance may be own cousin to Persephone in the courts of Hades ;

Gawain, waxing in strength as the sun mounts the sky, certainly

suggests the large family of sun-heroes ; and Perceval, dumb and

puzzled as the Grail passes before the bier of a king dying yet

never dead, may assist at the mystic burial rites of an Eastern

god of vegetation.

Malory, as Miss Scudder points out in dealing with the Tristram

story, is at times disappointing by reason of his prolixity, his

omissions, his repetitions, and his general tendency to dilute and

weaken the finest of the old legends. But taken as a whole ‘the

Morte d’Arthur is unique, not so much in its type as in its genius’ ;

and ‘the final quality of Malory’s art lies deeper than cadence or

dramatic narrative ; it is his power of suggestion’. Chapter V of

Part III deals with this ‘suggestion’ under the name of ‘causality’

(the determinism of the modern psychologist), and points to it

as ‘the hall-mark of romance at its conclusion rather than its

inception’

Finally, Miss Scudder assigns to Malory—excelled as he is at

various points by Chaucer, Langland, and the unknown author of

the West Midland alliterative poems—the credit of having written

‘the most important single book produced in England during the

Middle Ages’. ‘No other book’, she concludes, ‘so carries the

weight and force of a whole epoch, crystallized in the alembic of

the imagination, and emerging in its immortal part alone.’

This contribution to Arthurian exegetic literature has value, but

we could wish that it were less explanatory and more suggestive.

Many of the descriptive, paraphrastic, and eulogistic passages

might well be omitted without detriment to the main theme.

Even a young reader prefers to draw his own conclusions in

matters of aesthetics,

Study of the Arthurian story may well lead on by a natural

transition to the subject of an article by Professor I. Gollancz on

The Middle Ages in the Lineage of English Poetry.5 This article

forms one chapter of a valuable work in which ten contributors

5 Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization, ed. by F.J.C. Hearnshaw,

M.A., LL.D. London : Harrap, 1921. 262 pp. 10s. 6d.

46

MIDDLE ENGLISH

have devoted themselves to the exposition of the debt which

modern civilization owes to the Middle Ages.

Tracing the mediaeval element in fourteenth-century literature,

the writer distinguishes 'two schools, the Chaucerian and

the West Midland, representing two great voices in the harmonies of

English poetry', the one mainly artistic, the other mainly moral

and didactic. In the poet of the Pearl these two are blended, and

it is for this reason that 'he, in a sense more truly than Chaucer,

is the herald of the Elizabethan poets'. Spenser is his literary

descendant, in whom the mediaeval spirit finds its fullest expression

in Elizabethan times. That same spirit rescued the drama from

subservience to classical rules, and helped it to unite the freedom

of the Old Teutonic alliterative metre with the form of academic

blank verse. Later and more consciously, the influence of

mediaevalism is wooed by the poets of the Romantic Revival—in

the pioneer work of Percy, Macpherson, Ossian, Gray, and Chatter-

ton, and in the maturer romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Keats, Tennyson, and above all Morris, the most thoroughly

mediaeval of modern English poets.

Last among this year's critical writings stands a welcome

new edition, revised, reset, and freshly illustrated, of that com-

pendium of good things, Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in

the Middle Ages.6 It seems hardly necessary to describe a work

of which ten impressions have been exhausted since its first

appearance as a translation in 1889. The life of the open road

was (and has remained until its recent lamentable obscuration by

heavy motor traffic) one with the life of the English country-side,

and in the fourteenth century it might serve as an introduction to

members of every order of society, secular and religious, from the

jugglers, the pedlar, and the outlaw to the pilgrim of high or of

low rank in the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy.

This theme is developed by M. Jusserand, and great value is

added to his exposition by the sixty-eight excellent illustrations

providing visual proof of the rich and varied circumstance of

mediaeval life in the fourteenth century. These, probably, give rise

6 English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (14th century), by J. J. Juss-

erand, translated from the French by L. Toulmin Smith. London : Fisher

Unwin. New ed. 1920. 416 pp. + App. 22 pp. 25s. net.

MIDDLE ENGLISH

47

to the one regrettable feature of the book; it weighs close upon

3 lb., and is consequently unpleasant to handle.

We now turn to books presenting more of the raw material of

scholarship. A surprising amount of such work stands to the

credit of the Early English Text Society. This is partly due to

difficulty of production during and immediately after the War,

which has delayed till 1920–2 the appearance of several volumes

intended for issue at a much earlier date.

It is pleasant to take up a new volume bearing the honoured

name of Dr. Furnivall. This small book, entitled The Gild of

St. Mary, Lichfield7 contains some Gild Ordinances of Richard II

and of Sir Humfrey Stanley, Dean Heywood's Reform of Our

Lady's Alms-Chest, the first and second extant Charters of the

Lichfield Tailors and Smiths, and a few other fragments. The

editorial matter is very slight, but we recognize the personal touch

of our old friend in the marginal summaries, and in the relegation

to oblivion of another Ordinance—‘It has twenty-three clauses

founded almost wholly on the foregoing Ordinances. I don't

think it worth printing.’ The Ordinances chosen for reproduction

have appeared before in Harwood's History of Lichfield, 1807,

but have here been made more accessible. They are first-rate

specimens of their type.

The English writings of the Bishop and Cardinal John Fisher

were issued by the Early English Text Society under the editor-

ship of Professor Mayor in 1876. To these Mr. Bayne added

shortly before his death a transcript of the MS. Life of Fisher

in the British Museum ascribed to Richard Hall.8

The Life contains a variety of information, relating, not merely

to Fisher himself, but to such topics as the founding of St. John's

College, Cambridge, Fisher's relations with Luther and Wolsey,

the marriage of Catharine of Aragon, the death of Henry VII,

and the matrimonial and ecclesiastical affairs of Henry VIII.

7 The Gild of St. Mary, Lichfield, ed. by the late Dr. F. J. Furnivall.

London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S. 1920.

82 pp. 15s. net.

8 The Life of Fisher, transcribed from MS. Harleian 6382 by the Rev.

Ronald Bayne, M.A. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press,

for E.E.T.S. 1921. 140 pp. 15s. net.

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Finally, it is told how Fisher, refusing to subscribe by oath to

the establishment of the King's succession, was sent to the Tower

at the same time as Sir Thomas Moore. The gift of a Cardinal's

hat from the Pope did not avert his fate, Henry's comment being—

'Let the Pope send him a hatt when he will, but I will so provide

that when soever it commeth he shall weare it on his shoulders,

for head shall he have none to sett it on'. Upon the evidence of

Rich, Fisher was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered;

and the weak and sickly old man died with the high courage of

a Socrates, his martyrdom increasing the odium already incurred

by the miserable King, and Ann Bullen, 'cheef persecutor of this

holy man'.

Save for some final pages of moralizing, the Life is written

with a vividness and sympathy which hold the reader's attention

throughout. It is interesting to observe traces of the dawning

fashion of euphuism in the repetitional or punning tendency of

some of the sentences, e.g. [By this] (the 'fresh and lively' colour

in Fisher's cheeks after decapitation) 'was notifyed to the worlde

the innocencie and holines of this blessed father, that thus inno-

cently was contented to loose his heade, in defence of his mothers

heade, the holy Catholick Church of Christ'.

A certain amount of biographical material exists concerning the

early fifteenth-century bishop of St. Asaph, Reginald Pecock,

whom Edward IV wrote to the Pope as 'a monstrous promoter

of iniquity and perdition'. Of his six surviving works, however,

little is generally known, and the Donet, of which like the rest

only one copy is extant, has not previously been edited. Miss

Hitchcock's treatment of the unique Bodleian MS.9 is thorough

and conscientious in a high degree. The moral treatise itself

differs little in general tone and structure from many other ex-

amples of its type, save that it contains some evidence of more

independent thought and a wider culture. But its relation to

Pecock's better-known Poore Mennis Myrrour, and the place

of both in his carefully mapped-out philosophy of religion (a

philosophy which exalts reason as 'the largist book of autoritee that

euer god made') are of some interest. To Pecock, as the editor

9 The Donet, by Reginald Pecock, D.D., ed. by Elsie V. Hitchcock, B.A.

London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S. 1921.

xxii + 270 pp. 35s. net.

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49

observes, ‘religion is a logical necessity, reason is a religious necessity’. He anticipates the Age of Reason, while at the same time perpetuating the mediaeval fusion of philosophy with theology, to the detriment of both.

Pecock’s dialect is mainly East Midland, but with characteristics distinguishing it from the contemporary London speech.

Another early fifteenth-century MS. is that which through the care of Professor Gollancz and the industry of Miss Day has been secured for the British Museum, and happily named the Wheatley MS.,10 in memory of Dr. Wheatley, who served the Early English Text Society as Honorary Secretary and as Treasurer till his death in 1917. The contents of this MS. are exceedingly varied ; it is in fact an anthology, containing some items hitherto unknown, notably An Orison on the Passion, A Prayer to the Blessed Virgin, and A Hymn to St. John the Baptist. The pieces are in different dialects, among which the East Midland preponderates. Miss Day has supplied a good Preface (which would be better named an Introduction), Notes, and Glossary—the two latter commendably brief and business-like.

Notes and articles dealing with Middle English philology are this year somewhat numerous. Good textual notes and an exceptionally full glossary to the dialogue entitled Vices and Virtues,11 dating from about 1200, have been written by Dr. F. Holthausen. Englische Studien for 192112 contains a short but suggestive article by O. Funke, Zur Wortgeschichte der französischen Elemente im Englischen, with lists of French words found in certain twelfth- and thirteenth-century writings.

In an interesting article on Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English13 Mr. Moore discusses the substitution of the

10 The Wheatley Manuscript, ed. from Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 39574, by Mabel Day, Litt.D. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S., 1921. 30s. net.

11 Vices and Virtues, ed. by Ferd. Holthausen, Ph.D. Part II: Notes and Glossary. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S., 1921.. 116 pp. 12s. net.

12 Englische Studien, 55. Band, 1. Heft. Leipzig, 1921.

13 Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English, by Samuel Moore. (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxvi, no. 1, March 1921.)

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latter for the former during the ME. period. Most scholars agree

that loss of grammatical gender was due to the disappearance of

the gender-distinguishing forms of the strong adjective, the definite

article, and the demonstrative and other pronouns. But they have

hitherto failed to correlate with this the further fact of the reten-

tion of such forms in the personal pronouns. Mr. Moore's argu-

ment is that natural gender 'came in by way of the personal

pronouns', in which grammatical and natural gender very seldom

conflicted; and this he develops with much care and skill, illus-

trating his thesis by means of numerous examples.

Anglia for January 1921 contains14 an instalment of Georg

Dubislav's interesting detached notes on points of Middle English

syntax. Probably the most noteworthy contribution to language

study in a recent periodical is Mr. Lindkvist's fifty-page article

(virtually a treatise) in the same number, on the origin of the pro-

noun she.15 Step by step Mr. Lindkvist demonstrates the weakness

of hitherto accepted or suggested theories; and having demolished

their claim, he proceeds to build up carefully and skilfully a new

explanation, i. e. that the Old Northumbrian hio developed into

hjo, jo, in the first of which the j became consonantal and very

slightly sounded. This form, by false division with the third

person singular present indicative of verbs in phrases like hæfes

hio, wæs hio, became shjo, scho; and another blend of scho with

he or 3e, taking place in the N. E. M. dialect, produced sche and she,

which occur first in the Peterborough Chronicle of 1140 A.D. The

chief difficulty in establishing this theory arises from the scantiness

of Northern material in the Early ME. period. Mr. Lindkvist

frankly admits the gaps in his evidence, and thereby predisposes

us all the more to accept a hypothesis which appears eminently

sound and rational.

The year's Modern Philology contains several noteworthy articles.

Mr. Bryan16 disputes the usually accepted explanation of the

Pres. Indic. suffix e(n), which he calls 'the most marked single

characteristic of the Midland dialect', as due to analogy with the

14 Studien zur mittelenglischen Syntax, III, Georg Dubislav.

15 On the Origin and History of the English Pronoun She, Harald Lindkvist.

(Anglia, Band xlv, Erstes Heft.)

16 The Midland Present Plural Indicative ending e(n), by W. F. Bryan.

(Moder Philology, xviii, no. 9, January 1921.)

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51

Plural Present Subjunctive, reinforced perhaps by the Plural

Preterite Subjunctive and Indicative. His theory is that this

ending, which in the E. M. dialect has supplanted þ by the middle

of the twelfth century, owes its origin rather to the influence of

the preterite present verbs, and of some forms of the substantive

verb, viz. sindon, earon, bþon. Analogical levelling occurs only

where close points of contact, either formal or functional, exist ;

and functional contacts are closest between the Plural Present

Indicative of normal verbs, and the corresponding parts of the

preterite presents and the substantive verb. Evidence proves

cross-levelling between the two endings (þ and n) at an early stage,

after which the strong influence of the most primitive verb-forms

in the language seems to prevail. Mr. Bryan admits and discusses

some opposing tendencies in dialects other than the Midland.

Another new suggestion emanates from Mr. Hulbert, who writes

on The ‘ West Midland’ of the Romances.17 He calls attention to

the slight basis of evidence upon which the ascription of Sir

Gawayn and the other poems of its MS. and group to the W. M.

district actually rests. Morris, the first editor of Sir Gawayn,

drew his conclusions entirely from the verb-inflections and the

use of the genitive hit, both doubtful and possibly fallacious as

evidence. Other critics have accepted these conclusions. Even

Dr. Jordan’s and Professor Wyld’s researches fail to provide any

convincing linguistic proof that the poems were written in the

West; and the evidence of metre and subject-matter seems, when

investigated, to be equally inconclusive.

Mr. Hulbert does not attempt to force any opposite theory upon

his readers, being strongly of opinion that the exact localization

of ME. documents, on linguistic grounds at least, is an impossi-

bility. He takes his stand on the fact that the mixture of

Northern inflections and Midland phonology which characterizes

these poems occurs ‘all along the border between the N. and M.

districts’, as e.g. in the Norfolk Guild returns, the Towneley

Plays, Havelok, and the work of Robert Mannyng—the resem-

blances between texts so diverse having regard, of course, to certain

broader features only. Thus ‘until some evidence which does

connect with the West is produced, we are justified only in saying

17 The ‘ West Midland’ of the Romances, by J. R. Hulbert. (Modern

Philology, xix, no. 1, Aug. 1921.)

D 2

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that these (i. e. Sir Gawayn and the other members of the group)

are North Midland documents.'

Perhaps the most important outcome of this theory is the fact

that it would render nugatory the usual assumption that the

fourteenth-century revival of alliterative metre took place in the

West. Mr. Hulbert points out that 'of the alliterative poetry

which is localized (e.g. the York Plays, and the work of Rolle)

most is Northern' and quotes in support of this the words of

Chaucer's Parson—

'I am a southeren man,

I kan not geste rum, ram, ruf by lettre.'

Another contribution to the study of the same group of poems

is made by Mr. O. F. Emerson in a paper18 intended 'to empha-

size the relation of linguistic facts to the metrical irregularities

of ME. poetry, through application to two poems belonging to

the same time and district'—i. e. Pearl and Sir Gawayn. Mr.

Emerson's conclusion is to the effect that most, if not all, of the

imperfect riming lines in these poems can be explained by the

double pronunciation of many words with and without a final e,

due, of course, to the transitional state of the language. Such

double forms are rarer in these texts than in Chaucer, but are by

no means unknown.

Mr. Steadman, writing on the date of Winnere and Wastoure,19

rearranges the evidence made use of by Sir Israel Gollancz in

his edition of that poem, and adds to it further facts which serve

to confirm the acceptance of the year 1352-3. 'If we assume any

other date, the purpose, the allegory, the definite references to

topics of the day, in short, the timeliness of the poem and its

significance as a pamphlet of the hour, are at once considerably

weakened, if not rendered quite meaningless.'

Last come a couple of articles dealing with literary matters.

One20 is an original and interesting analysis of the last twelve

stanzas of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, which stand apart

18 Imperfect Lines in 'Pearl' and the Rimed Parts of 'Sir Gawayn', by

O. F. Emerson. (Modern Philology, xix, no. 2, Nov. 1921.)

19 The Date of Winnere and Wastoure, by J. M. Steadman. (Modern

Philology, xix, no. 2 Nov. 1921.)

20 The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus, by John S. P. Tatlock. (Modern

Philology, xviii, no. 12, Apr. 1921.)

from the rest of the poem, and are characterized by a curious

mixture of grandeur with pathos, nobility with charm. Mr. Tat-

lock speaks in particular of two out of the five sections into which

the Epilogue naturally falls, i. e. lines 1786–92 and 1835–59.

He shows the antiquity of the ‘Go, Little Book’ conceit, con-

siders the often-quoted dedication to Gower and Strode, and

discusses in detail the exhortation to Youth in stanza 263 (‘O

yonge fresshe folkes’) and the combat between Catholic and Classic-

Renaissance tradition indicated in stanza 265. What seems re-

markable is that ‘the heartfelt worldly tale’ should at the last

be interpreted in an unworldly sense : Chaucer ‘tells the story

in one mood and ends in another’. What can be the reason for

this change, and (especially) for the attack upon pagan learning in

stanza 265 ?

In answering this question, Mr. Tatlock calls attention to the

partial severance between the early Humanists and the Church,

which brought even Petrarch and Boccaccio (sincere Catholics

who, however, reconciled their faith with classical scholarship)

under the suspicion of unorthodoxy. Chaucer wished to avoid

such misunderstanding (cf. his attitude in the Franklin’s Tale

and the Retraction after the Parson’s Tale) and so to a poem full

of the colour and atmosphere of paganism he feels it necessary

to add, even at some sacrifice of artistic effect, ‘a makeshift

unification of the work with everything else in his friends’ minds

and in his own’. He domesticates it, in fact, by ‘ending on a

familiar though discordant note’.

The same number of Modern Philology contains 21 a section

of an article on The Grail and the English Sir Perceval, usefully

supplementing the researches of Miss Weston dealt with in the

previous volume of The Year’s Work.

21 The Grail and the English Sir Perceval, by A. C. L. Brown. (Modern

Philology, xviii, no. 12, Apr. 1921.)

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[By Arthur W. Reed]

Mr. Einstein's study1 of the political, social, and literary ideals of the sixteenth century will take a high place among the many contributions to learning and belles lettres that we owe on both sides of the Atlantic to distinguished members of the diplomatic service. To many students of Tudor literature it may well become the book to which they turn when they are at a loss to recapture the Tudor attitude to what we may call the questions of the day. Mr. Einstein's book is deceptive in its ease and singular lucidity ; one has to turn to the notes to see the other side of the tapestry. Younger writers of academic dissertations might learn much from him of the literary art of digesting evidences and original material. A detailed appreciation of the work belongs rather to the field of social history than of literature and is not permissible here, but students of the literature of the sixteenth century will be well-advised to go to Mr. Einstein for guidance as to the material available for their inquiries and the use that may be made of it by the scholar who is a man of culture.

An important work in this section of The Year's Work appeared just in time to be very briefly noticed by Mr. Arundel Esdaile last year. Professor Berdan's Early Tudor Poetry2 calls for a more extended appreciation than was possible then. In itself the poetry of the Early Tudors has small merit, nor does Mr. Berdan aim at winning converts for it. His enthusiasm is rather for the questions it raises, and there are many. There are the traditions to which in a degenerate way it conforms, its efforts to speak in a new manner and to handle new material ; there are

1 Tudor Ideals, by Lewis Einstein. New York : Harcourt, Brace & Co.; London: G. Bell & Sons, 1921. 14s. net.

2 Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1547 (Studies in Tudor Literature), by John M. Berdan. New York : The Macmillan Company, 1920. £1 6s. net.

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the shadowy figures of Hawes and Barclay, the more definite but still obscure figure of Skelton, the still more definite but not very poetical John Heywood, and lastly there is the metrical confusion of most of its verse until there emerges Tottel's Miscellany.

These and many other problems Mr. Berdan attacks in six elaborate and important essays.

His method has its faults. There is much repetition ; important problems are scattered disconnectedly through the book and are hard to gather together.

On the supremely important question of versification Mr. Berdan has made it almost impossible for the reader to determine with accuracy all that his scattered passages actually indicate.

A good index would have corrected this fault, but Mr. Berdan's index barely extends beyond names and titles ; key-words to subjects are missing.

Again, Mr. Berdan's title is a little misleading ; he deals with many subjects whose bearing on poetry may seem too remote.

Probably half of his space is given to prose writers, educationists and humanists, Ascham, Elyot, Berners, More, and Vives.

But Mr. Berdan brings originality to all his work, and leaves no subject that he touches where he found it.

Few books of recent years have shown greater energy of investigation, and Mr. Berdan's gift of analytical shrewdness is likely to direct inquiries into fruitful channels when he has not himself done more than indicate a solution.

For the student of Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and particularly of John Skelton, his work has unusual value, and it is not easy to point to a single book in which a clearer and more acceptable analysis of their work and the influences and conditions that went to its making is to be found.

His attempt to excite interest in John Heywood's Spider and the Flie would be justified if his key to the allegory were the right one, but in following the interpretation advanced by Haber in 1900, he has been misled.

Wolsey was surely not the spider, and Haber does not identify the fly.

In indicating the place of the allegory in the line of descent that passed through Mother Hubberd's Tale and The Hind and the Panther Mr. Berdan is on safer ground.

To the problems of Early Tudor versification Mr. Berdan has made an interesting contribution in his chapter on 'The Scholastic Tradition' by his ingenious study of Medieval Latin verse-forms

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and theory of prosody. Particularly interesting is the light these

forms and traditions throw on the practice of Skelton. On one

of the main problems of Early Tudor poetry, Mr. Berdan, however,

is not convincing. How arose the syllabic and iambic structure

of so much of the verse in Tottel ? He addresses himself to the

development of blank verse with success, but to the more funda-

mental question he appears to devote little attention. Thus he

does not make it clear whether by the foot Ascham means the

syllable or the iambic group. John Frith, who was born in the

same year as Wyatt, had clear views on this point, and in a

controversial pamphlet in 1532 teases an opponent for his omission

of a syllable—he calls it a foot—in some English verses. Frith

was an Eton and King’s College man, but he was also a Lutheran

reformer, and it is to be regretted that Mr. Berdan has not dealt

more fully with the metrical versions of the Psalms. Sternhold

was a sound iambicist, and the popularity of the Psalms has its

importance for metrical questions.

In the chapter on ‘Humanism’, which opens with a useful

study of Alexander Barclay and closes with a somewhat depreci-

atory examination of Wyatt, too much space is allotted to More

and the educational writers. Mr. Berdan seems to offer as a

justification for this, an interesting speculation on Ascham as the

theorist, and Grimald as the exponent, of a classicism which in-

spired or approved blank verse. To the question which he raises

as to the priority of Grimald or Surrey as writers in blank verse,

it is of small importance that he cannot supply an answer;

Grimald wrote nothing that counts; but in his speculation that

blank verse developed in England independently of Italian

influence Mr. Berdan is not likely to win approval. It was

called ‘a straunge metre’ and ‘straunge’ can only have one

meaning. In dealing so fully with More and his circle it may

be noted that no reference has been made to that admirable

Chaucerian, Walter Smythe, More’s personal servant, and after-

wards Sword-Bearer to the Lord Mayor. Smythe’s Merry jests

of the Widow Edith throw unexpected light on the life of the

household in Chelsea, and it is written in couplets of quaint

irregularity, but obviously in imitation of Chaucer.

In his chapter on ‘The Influence of Contemporary Literatures’

Mr. Berdan lays stress on the slightness of our indebtedness to

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Spain, Germany, and France, and in order to establish this negative result he makes considerable digressions, in which he deals with the Spanish Celestine and the English Calisto and Melibœa, with the printer Van Doesborgh and his assistant Laurence Andrewe, with Til Eulenspiegel and Andrewe’s humorous translations with Barclay and the authorship of The Castle of Love and with mock wills. He makes the interesting suggestion that Andrewe ‘may have been the chief channel through which German literature entered England’, but Andrewe was an unfortunate young printer and translator who fled the country about 1527, owing some £25 to an older printer. His work interests bibliographers but had little vogue. His importance for early Tudor poetry would have been perhaps better reflected in a foot-note. In his conclusion that our debt to France was small Mr. Berdan questions the deductions of Sir Sidney Lee, but in so doing raises perhaps more questions than the answers. It is notable in this connexion that Scottish poetry finds no place in Early Tudor Poetry.

Mr. Berdan appears to underrate Wyatt as a versifier. Is it not the case that Wyatt is in general syllabic, though not always, or even usually, iambic? Read in a deliberate, almost spondaic, way, Wyatt is an accurate metrist. Donne has often the same deliberate syllabic movement. Surrey is iambic; he develops upon Wyatt. The one recovered the syllabic law, the other found freedom of movement within it. Closely connected with the deliberate movement of his verse is the impression of strong lyrical sincerity in Wyatt’s verse, a quality which Mr. Berdan seems also to undervalue.

In the last chapter, which is devoted to Surrey, Mr. Berdan, against the balance of his own evidence, appears to discount unnecessarily Surrey’s regard for Wyatt. Surrey’s praise is that of the disciple who surpasses his master in technical ease, but Surrey acknowledges his discipleship. He has, too, his own qualities, his own happiness in natural description for example. He has his own sincerity, an easier sincerity and less impressive than Wyatt’s because of its easier fluency. In dealing with the Virgil of Douglas and of Surrey, the suggestion that phrases common to both may be due to commentaries accessible to both deserves the investigation that Mr. Berdan suggests. Miss Gladys

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Willcock's work upon the Britwell text now appearing in the

Modern Language Review may solve some of the problems that

Mr. Berdan raises, but it is doubtful whether questions of date

can be satisfactorily solved.

Mr. Berdan's future work will be looked for with interest, but

one may not unkindly hope that he will confine his next book to

a space less than 500 pages, for when he is not at grips with

a problem he has a tendency to hold forth.

Mr. Taylor's Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century 3

was awaited with interest as the work of a writer who had won

respect on both sides of the Atlantic by his earlier studies,

Ancient Ideals: A Study of Intellectual and Spiritual Growth

from Early Times to the Establishment of Christianity, and

The Mediaeval Mind. He is engaged upon an extensive survey

which calls for wide erudition and unusual staying power.

Mr. Taylor has these qualifications, and we would add to them

features that make all that he writes attractive, his strong

common sense and admirably direct English. Hallam's Intro-

duction to the Literature of Europe (1837) is now supplemented

by Mr. Taylor's work in the same field, and they who know their

Hallam best will best appreciate his successor's qualifications to

survey the ground afresh.

The first volume of Thought and Expression deals with Italy,

Germany, and France, and does not come within the scope of this

survey.

In the second volume we would first draw attention to the

remarkable closing chapter. It is a notable piece of writing,

and as the days of great prefaces have passed we suggest that

Mr. Taylor's readers should begin with his chapter on 'The

Sixteenth-Century Forms of Expression'. The second volume has

two sections, twelve chapters on England, and five on Philosophy

and Science. Well-known ground is covered by the chapter on

'English Education in Letters'; but Mr. Taylor has the gift of

giving freshness to familiar things. The problem of justifying

the persecution of heretics by the author of Utopia is left unsolved

once more. May not More have been fighting for the Utopian

3

Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century, by Henry Osborne

Taylor. (2 vols.) New York : The Macmillan Company. 50s. net.

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vision of a Europe united under a liberal Catholicism ? Visionaries are not seldom extremists.

With the ‘English Reformation’ Mr. Taylor deals in a series of studies’ on Wyclif and his successors, Lutheranism and Social Discontent, and finally Tyndale. In all this we find the ‘catholic expression of the temper and formative genius of the English people’. An admirable chapter on Hugh Latimer followed by an analysis of Puritan Doctrine leads up to Richard Hooker and the Anglican via media, a formula which appeals to the writer. ‘A via media was the English people composite in race and language ; a twisting via media was their great queen ; a seemly via media was the Anglican Church.’

Some of Mr. Taylor’s chapters are tours de force. Such are that last chapter already mentioned, and the equally vigorous essay on ‘Elizabethans’. The study of Elizabeth and Cecil is a memorable piece of writing, incisive and convincing. Not less interesting is the freshness of the chapter on Spenser, a subject that yields full scope for Mr. Taylor’s command of vivid and arresting comparative illustration.

As Italy expressed itself in painting so the Elizabethans found their self-expression in Drama. Yet as Mr. Taylor pertinently indicates, Elizabethan drama had its exclusions. Necessarily it was not religious ; the necessity was political. Broadly speaking, it passed by the daily life of the people, the diggers and delvers, trade and commerce, the crafts and professions save the profession of arms. It is to Shakespeare inevitably that Mr. Taylor turns now. ‘He is worth all the rest.’ The man of the ‘tender forgiveness’ of the Sonnets, tolerant even of insensibility, ‘casts out no phase of life through impatience’. To write a short essay on Shakespeare and carry the applause of the reader is to succeed. Mr. Taylor rises to the test. None will read this treatment of the sonnets and their echoes in the plays without regretting that Mr. Taylor had not the space to deal more fully with his theme.

The section on Philosophy and Science lies for the most part outside the field of English Studies. Enough has been said of the rest of the book to indicate the quality of this section.

The ground that Mr. Taylor has surveyed in Thought and Expression is familiar to a wider range of readers than he could appeal to in The Mediaeval Mind. For this reason his necessary

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omissions and compressions will provoke the criticism of those

who have special knowledge of this or that plot of the ground.

Mr. Taylor's book will nevertheless correct the fault of the

specialists by directing their attention to the things of true value,

and by showing them that history is not a record of static fact

but of movement and growth. Mr. Taylor's earlier studies on the

ancient and mediaeval worlds give him the right to speak on the

Renaissance, although he eschews the word, for the good reason

that the Renaissance grew like everything else out of its own past

and was itself as new as was once the ancient world.

In 1913 the Comtesse de Chambrun devoted some space in her

study on The Sonnets of Shakespeare (Putnam) to John Florio, the

translator of Montaigne and sometime Italian-master to Shake-

speare's patron, Southampton. She has now followed this up with

a study of the life and works of Florio,4 and a detailed examination

of the evidences that appear to support her thesis that Shakespeare's

acquaintance with Florio and his works is widely apparent in the

plays. Speaking broadly she has a good case, and her book merits

the attention of Shakespearians, but it is marred by an obvious

anxiety to omit nothing, however slight its relevance, that may

appear to support her thesis.

The Florios, like the Diodati, were Italian Protestants deni-

zened in England, who married English wives. Theodore Diodati,

whose son Charles was Milton's friend, helped Florio with his

Montaigne. The same Theodore taught Italian to Sir John

Harington, the translator of Ariosto. One would have liked to

see this interesting biographical field adequately explored, but on

the life of Florio, the author has nothing new. Her researches

have not been biographical.

The Comtesse de Chambrun is, however, the fortunate owner of

all Florio's works except Ramusio's Voyages, and the main value

of her dissertation comes from the full and ingenious use she has

made of this valuable material. The works are (1) Florio: His

First Fruits (1578), (2) Ramusio's Voyages (1580), (3) Florio's

Second Fruits (1591),(4) A Woorldé of Words (1598), (5) The Essays

4 Giovanni Florio, Un Apôtre de la Renaissance en Angleterre, by Long-

worth-Chambrun. Paris : Payot. 20 f.

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61

... of ... Montaigne (1603), (6) Queen Anna's New World of Words (1611).

The First and Second Fruits are miscellanies intended to form an introduction to the study of the Italian language. They contain proverbs, dialogues, a Grammar, and general observations. The Worlde of Words is an Italian-English dictionary. To the Worlde of Words one regrets that Florio did not add the English-Italian supplement that he apparently projected, for hidden away there are many words and phrases—rialto, bezonian, rude mechanicals—of interest to Shakespearian students. In citing instances of these and equally interesting imported words such as festinate, the Countess sometimes omits to note the edition she is quoting. The prefaces and dedicatory epistles to the works which are all reprinted as appendices will be of considerable value to scholars.

That Florio the pedant and Shakespeare the playwright moved in the same circle has long been admitted, and Mr. Arthur Acheson has recently asked us to accept some highly improbable deductions from this admission. Compared with Mr. Acheson, the Comtesse de Chambrun is reasonable in her demands. She accepts Warburton's assertion, however, that Florio is ridiculed in Holofernes, a supposition difficult to accept if we are to think of Shakespeare as continuing to draw on his victim for all the hints and suggestions that she indicates.

The chapter on ‘Concordances’ is an unsatisfactory medley of admirable and negligible citations. There can be no value, not even the value that comes of cumulative effect, in claiming as borrowings from Florio some fifteen common proverbs, most of which are to be found in John Heywood's Proverbs. On the other hand, the passage in Macbeth on the ‘temple-haunting martlets’ seems to re-echo Montaigne and may have come through Florio. Other parallels cited are worthy of examination, but the theme of the ‘seven ages of man’ had had a time-honoured career, and is valueless as evidence that Shakespeare saw Florio's Montaigne in manuscript.

It is suggested that Shakespeare owed his French to Florio on the ground that it was bookish, and not the sort of French that his association with the Mountjoys and his other French friends would have taught him. This cannot be taken seriously. In any case the dramatist is not airing his French in Henry V, but

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THE RENAISSANCE

writing the kind of French his audience would enjoy and understand.

It is this piling up of supports injudiciously selected that disturbs the reader. We are asked to assume that four references to Machiavelli imply Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Florio’s general Italian influence, yet two are from Henry VI and one from The London Prodigal, ‘ que nous croyons due à la plume du grand poète ’.

It would be unjust, however, to pass by the many admirable features of the book, and to leave the impression that the study is wanting in restraint. The First Part—The Life and Works—fills a long-felt need, and is almost wholly admirable. The Second Part—Shakespeare and Florio—is less satisfactory, but chiefly because the writer seeks doubtful aids in a good cause. It should be added that, besides its useful appendices, the book has numerous photogravure facsimiles of interest.

The aim of Mr. Williams’s article on Epic Unity 5 is to examine chronologically the various theories on the subject of Epic Unity propounded by critical writers in Italy in the half-century from Vida (1527), a period in which the problem was variously treated until it reached in Castelvetro (1576) its final development in the conception of the three unities.

Following Bywater’s Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, Mr. Williams opens with a summary of Aristotle’s doctrine and precepts. He summarizes the Italian interpretations of Aristotle published during the half-century, showing how critical opinion adapted, by stretching it, the doctrine of the Unity of Action to cover the episodic romance of Ariosto, until Castelvetro found dramatic unity of action to be subordinate to, being consequent on, the unities of time and place. On the relations of dramatic to epic unity Mr. Williams writes with discernment and lucidity, and his article is a welcome contribution to a subject on which there is too much loose talk.

Without any claims to completeness, and without technicalities, Miss Hickey’s 6 article offers a suggestive outline of some of the

5 Epic Unity as discussed by Sixteenth-Century Critics in Italy, by Ralph C. Williams (Modern Philology, xviii).

6 The Making of English Blank-Verse, by Emily Hickey (The Nineteenth Century and After, Dec. 1920).

THE RENAISSANCE

63

earlier developments in English blank-verse that will be welcomed

by many who like unpretentious writing. A useful sketch of

Italian non-riming verse and Surrey’s indebtedness to Italian blank-

verse precedes a more detailed examination of the Tudor poets.

The treatment of the pause is happily illustrated.

Dr. Hillebrand’s article7 forms a useful supplement to Dr.

Rimbault’s edition of The Old Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal,

1560-1643 (Camden Society, New Series No. 3), the Bodleian

duplicate of which Dr. Hillebrand now reprints for the first time

with indications of all departures from Rimbault’s original. These

are numerous, especially in the seventeenth century. Of particular

interest are the precedents which form an appendix to the duplicate

giving directions for the guidance of the treasury, showing scales

of payment, noting grants of relief from taxation, and detailing the

expenses of the choir that accompanied the King’s progress into

Scotland in 1633. Dr. Hillebrand prefaces his reprint with a

valuable essay on the early history of the Chapel Royal in which

he uses new material bearing upon the impressing of choristers, an

infliction from which St. Paul’s and the Royal Chapel claimed

immunity. For the period before 1560, Household Regulations

and Statutes and Wardrobe Books are re-examined, but the per-

sonnel of the Chapel is only intermittently found before we reach

The Cheque Book. Dr. Hillebrand, however, finds several new

lists in the Chamberlain’s Wardrobe accounts which have interest

as further limiting the field of surmise. Added in interest is attached

to the general increment in fees granted by James I, who also

revived the practice of sending boys to the University, by the

remark endorsed on the page stating the increments, ‘Cursed be

the partie that taketh this leafe out of this booke ’.

Canon H. F. Westlake8 notes a lease by Abbot Islip dated

Aug. 8, 1518, of a tenement on the south side of the great belfry ‘in

quo tenemento Johannes Skelton laureatus modo inhabitat’. The

south-west corner of the present Middlesex County Hall may be

7 The Early History of the Chapel Royal, by Harold N. Hillebrand (Modern

Philology, xviii, 5, Sept. 1920).

8 John Skelton, by H. F. Westlake (The Times Literary Supplement,

Oct. 27, 1921).

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THE RENAISSANCE

taken as indicating the site. Canon Westlake is in error in associating

Skelton's earlier residence with his sanctuary at Westminster. He

was on good terms with Wolsey after his appointment as sole Legate

in 1519, but having a friend in Islip was sheltered by him when he

had to flee from Wolsey's wrath 'pro vita seruanda' (Bale). He

died in sanctuary in June 1529.

An article by the present writer supplies new facts about the

career of John Rastell, the printer, who was brother-in-law of Sir

Thomas More, father-in-law of John Heywood, and great-grand-

father of John Donne. He was a Coventry man, and held the

office of Coroner until he established himself in London in the

early years of Henry VIII's reign, where he printed the great

volume of Fitzherbert's Grand Abridgment in the same year as the

Utopia appeared. Six months later he attempted a voyage to the

New Found Lands, but was victimized by his mariners. The dis-

covery of the depositions of witnesses in Rastell's prosecution of

the sailors explains his reference to his misadventure in the play

of The Four Elements.

He was interested in pageantry as well as plays, and was

emplóyed in devising and erecting the roofs at the Field of the

Cloth of Gold. His other pageants are described in the article.

After a life full of activity he joined More in his controversial

attack upon Tyndall and the 'heretics'. His Boke of Purgatory is

interesting for the light it throws on the authorship of Gentleness

and Nobility, which may be claimed for Rastell, whose hand is also

indicated in Calisto and Melibœa. Rastell was won over to the side

of the Reformers in the course of his controversies, and died in prison

a year after the execution of his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas More.

The site of the stage which Rastell erected in his grounds in Fins-

bury Fields (c. 1525) has particular interest for its proximity to that

of Burbage's well-known theatre of fifty years later.

Another article in the same volume on the Regulation of the

Book Trade 10 is based upon a series of proceedings recorded in the

9 John Rastell, Printer, Lawyer, Venturer, Dramatist, and Controversialist,

by A. W. Reed. (Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, xv, 1917-19.

[Pubd. 1920]).

10 The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538, by

A. W. Reed. (Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, xv.)

consistorial records at Somerset House. Its interest lies in its references to definite works, e. g. Margaret Roper's translation of the Paternoster of Erasmus, one of the offending books suspected of Lutheran tendencies, as well as the evidence it discovers of the relations of the printers to Wolsey and the ecclesiastical authorities. The article also investigates the origin of the phrase used in royal privileges Ad imprimendum solum which first appears as a correction in the hand of Henry VIII himself. The meaning of this phrase, which has been a matter of dispute, is probably now determined.

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SHAKESPEARE

[By Sidney Lee]

Shakespearian criticism and research have engaged a considerable amount of energy during the year 1921, but nothing of first

importance has been achieved. Speculation has been busy in many directions; the results are often interesting but rarely

conclusive.

Professor Odell, of Columbia University, to whom the chief honours of the year in this section are due, has rendered students

of Shakespeare valiant service in his history of Shakespeare on the London stage for approximately two centuries and a half.1

Professor Odell's book is a thoroughly readable piece of exhaustive research. The narrative begins with the reopening of

the London theatres after the Restoration of 1660, and ends with the retirement of Sir Henry Irving in 1902 from his

prolonged career as a producer of Shakespeare. The author's main aim is to describe the various modes in which theatrical

managers dealt with Shakespeare's text. But he has gone far beyond the textual aspects of his subject. He treats with great

fullness the history of the London theatres where Shakespearian drama was represented, and defines the varying methods

of its presentation. 'Scenery, machinery, costumes, pageantry, spectacle, music, song, dancing', all receive minute attention. The

result is the most complete and comprehensive study that exists of the fortunes of Shakespeare's plays at the hands of English actors

and managers.

Professor Odell divides his theme into seven sections, viz. :

The Age of Betterton, The Age of Cibber, The Age of Garrick,

The Age of Kemble, The Leaderless Age (1817–37), The Age of

1 Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, by George C. D. Odell, Professor of English in Columbia University. London: Constable, 1921. 2 vols.

i, xiv +456 pp.; ii, viii +498 pp.

Macready, The Age of Phelps and Charles Kean, and The Age of Irving. In an Epilogue entitled 'Recent Tendencies'; Professor Odell briefly describes the experiments of Mr. William Poel and Mr. Granville Barker. He faintly praises Mr. Poel's method and frankly condemns Mr. Barker's. But his general purpose is expository rather than critical, and he leaves his abundant testimony to speak for itself.

Professor Odell's researches show that through the first five of his seven Ages, Shakespeare's work on the stage was invariably subjected to the double process of drastic abbreviation and whole-sale revision. No play in the authentic text of the First Folio or of a trustworthy Quarto came to the notice of theatrical audiences during the late seventeenth century or at any period of the eighteenth. Even Garrick, despite his gifts of interpretation, 'improved' Shakespeare without any compunction. In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign Macready initiated a salutary reform in the way of textual accuracy, yet this eminent actor-manager never went the length of giving a Shakespearian play in full.

Macready's successors, Phelps, Charles Kean, Irving, and Tree remained loyal to his rule of textual veracity, but none of them advanced on Macready's defective standards of textual completeness. Indeed, scenes were omitted and invented with a new freedom in order to meet the requirements of the growing tendency to scenic pageantry. The scenic splendours of Shakespearian production reached their full height at the call of Irving and Tree. The processes of this development are described by Professor Odell in graphic detail, the value of which is enhanced by the pictorial illustrations. Contemporary taste would now seem to have revolted against the over-elaboration of the scenic setting which distinguished the past era. The change of sentiment is welcome. But simplicity of setting will hardly ensure Shakespeare's continued popularity with the theatrical public unless it be accompanied by histrionic efficiency of the high order which is associated with such names as Garrick, Edmund Kean, and Irving.

The general reader of whatever age, when beginning a study of Shakespeare's Plays, can have no better guidance than that which Dr. F. S. Boas provides in his slender booklet entitled 'An Intro-

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SHAKESPEARE

duction to the Reading of Shakspere.' Dr. Boas offers his reader

'infinite riches in a little room'. He treats, with a brevity which

he manages to reconcile with scholarly adequacy, well-nigh all the

topics with which it is to the obvious advantage of a beginner to

acquaint himself. He will learn from Dr. Boas's pages how the

plays were published, how they were produced on the Tudor stage,

and how the dramatist used his library, besides gaining some

knowledge of the essential features of Shakespeare's gifts of

characterization and of language. A final section luminously

defines Shakespeare's appeal to the modern mind. Although in

this work Dr. Boas does not address himself to the specialist, it is

not unworthy of a place in the specialist's library, so skilfully does

the author summarize the main results of recent research. At the

same time it should be understood that Dr. Boas never writes over

the head of the intelligent neophyte, who is to be congratulated on

having ready access to so stimulating a counsellor in the early

stages of his Shakespearean study.

The Cambridge University Press deserves praise for its cour-

age in undertaking a new edition of Shakespeare, The New

Shakespeare, of which the first three volumes appeared last year.3

There are many features in this edition which 'the modern

reader' and 'the ordinary lover of Shakespeare', for whom the

editors tell us that it is intended, are likely to welcome. The

admirable typography, the shape of the volumes which are fitted

for the pocket, the interesting frontispieces, the brief glossaries,

the appendices on stage history (by Mr. Harold Child) are all

attractive. The bold amplifications of the traditional stage directions

are helpful, even if many appear to be supererogatory. The

high price of the volumes is regrettable, however exorbitant may

be the current scale of manufacturing costs.

The editorial scheme deserves the credit of admirable intentions,

but many points in its execution suggest defects of judgement.

The two editors, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Mr. Dover Wilson,

An Introduction to the Reading of Shakspere, by F. S. Boas, M.A., LL.D.

[1920]. London : Duckworth. 72 pp.

The New Shakespeare. Edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and

John Dover Wilson. The Tempest. ix +116 pp. The Two Gentlemen of

Verona. xx +110 pp. The Merry Wives of Windsor. xl +149 pp. Cambridge

University Press, 1921.

SHAKESPEARE

69

have rather contrasted qualifications, and the division between them of the editorial labours, which are appropriate to their respective faculties, fails to exclude some discrepancies which would be better away. Sir Arthur supplies the literary information and criticism out of which the General Introduction and the special Introductions to individual plays are naturally woven. Sir Arthur’s essays form attractive reading. His coadjutor, Mr. Dover Wilson, furnishes an apparatus criticus of a novel kind which lends the edition, in the scholar’s eye, its most distinctive character. The two editors follow different paths, yet their work is at times inadequately co-ordinated, and some incongruities result. For example, Sir Arthur bestows high eulogy on the nineteenth century’s ‘great discovery of the chronological order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays’. It is, therefore, disconcerting to find that Mr. Dover Wilson, who is responsible for the textual arrangement of the edition, pays no heed to that discovery when adopting the First Folio’s time-honoured order of presenting the plays—an order which is unaffected by chronology. In his long and comprehensive Introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir Arthur covers, in his own interesting fashion, much of the ground which Mr. Wilson goes over again in more technical detail in his elaborate Appendix on the relations between the text of the First Folio version of the play and that of the Quarto of 1602. It is hardly needful for the same topic to be treated twice—each time from a somewhat different angle.

It is to Mr. Dover Wilson’s credit that he should endeavour to evolve a text which shall respect scientific principles. Probably no editor has submitted Shakespeare’s text to quite so searching a scrutiny, certainly no editor has claimed with greater confidence ability to pluck out the heart of all the textual mysteries. He seeks to define with precision the relations existing between Shakespeare’s manuscript and the early printed editions of his work. He is thoroughly convinced that Shakespeare was a supreme master of a system of punctuation, on which he relied in order to give full effect to the dramatic intention of his words. The dramatist’s method of punctuation, according to Mr. Wilson, is ‘dramatic, that is to say it is a question of pause, emphasis, and intonation, and it is quite independent of syntax’. The early editions are credited by Mr. Wilson with reproducing

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SHAKESPEARE

faithfully the punctuation of Shakespeare's devising. With the view

of enabling the reader of this edition to visualize Shakespeare's

'dramatic' mode of punctuation, Mr. Wilson has formulated a series

of new typographical symbols, the unfamiliarity of which makes

them rather puzzling.

Mr. Wilson presents his textual conclusions with much skill

and abundant enthusiasm, but no dispassionate observer can deny

that they rest on unstable foundations of conjecture and hypothesis.

Mr. Wilson, like all explorers of uncharted territory, too often

falls a victim to the tendency of making hypothesis do duty for

proved fact. Too many of his bricks are made without straw.

Before one can positively determine the accuracy with which

a printed text follows an author's manuscript, one must have

access to authentic specimens of the author's writing, at any rate

ample enough for the purpose. The long-cherished dream of

discovering a play by Shakespeare in his autograph has not yet

been realized.. It is true that Sir Edward Maunde Thompson has

tentatively pledged his high palaeographical authority to the

identification with Shakespeare's handwriting of a scene from

the play of Sir Thomas More in a British Museum MS. (Harl.

MS. 7368, 8 a, 8 b, 9 a). But Sir Edward's conclusion, which is

necessarily speculative, is a questionable basis for any large deduc-

tion. Mr. Wilson, on the other hand, regards 'the Shakespearian

addition to Sir Thomas More as an instrument of the highest

value for an editor of Shakespeare', and proceeds to the emenda-

tion of apparently corrupt passages on the assumption that we

possess full knowledge of Shakespeare's habits of penmanship.

The question of Shakespeare's method of punctuation stands on

much the same footing. The inquiries into this matter which

Mr. Percy Simpson and Mr. A. W. Pollard have undertaken have

led to attractive conjectures. Many affirmative instances of a

'dramatic' method of punctuation have been detected in the First

Folio and 'good' Shakespeare Quartos, but the ultimate significance

of such instances remains in doubt until the negative instances, which

are often more numerous, have received equally close attention.

But Mr. Wilson, heedless of quicksands, goes on his way

triumphing. In one place he writes :

'In short we believe that we know how Shakespeare wrote;

we have a definite clue to his system of punctuation; we feel

SHAKESPEARE

71

confident that often nothing but a compositor stands between us

and the original manuscript; we can at times even creep into

the compositor's skin and catch glimpses of the manuscript

through his eyes. The door of Shakespeare's workshop stands

ajar.'

In regard to Shakespeare's alleged mastery of the mysteries

of a 'dramatic' system of punctuation, Mr. Wilson indulges in

strains which are almost lyrical :

'A comma indicates a short pause, a semicolon a longer one,

a colon one longer still, and a full stop . . . a full stop, which

sometimes occurs in the middle of a sentence. Further, absence

of punctuation, where a modern reader would expect to find it,

implies rapid delivery. Brackets, on the other hand, affect

intonation rather than speed. Often they denote the drop in

the voice which a parenthesis demands; but there are many

beautiful instances which mark a much more significant change

of tone: a hushed whisper, a touch of anxiety, a note of tender-

ness, surprise or awe. In the same way the pause, especially

with the semicolon, the colon or the period, often needs filling

by a sob, a kiss, or by other and lengthier 'business'. As he

wrote Shakespeare had the living voice ever sounding in his

ears, the flesh and blood of his creations ever moving before his

eyes.'

It is, then, in Shakespeare's 'stops' that we must seek for the

final proofs of his dramatic genius. To Mr. Wilson's statement

one is almost tempted to apply the words of Miranda: 'Your tale,

Sir, would cure deafness.'

Mr. Douglas Ainslie does his fellow-countrymen a notable service

by giving them access, in their own language, to the estimate which

Benedetto Croce, the eminent aesthetic philosopher of Italy, has

formed of Shakespeare's genius and work.4 Although Croce's

volume includes critical essays on Ariosto and Corneille, 225 of the

430 pages in Mr. Ainslie's rendering are devoted to Shakespeare, so

that the book may be reckoned in the main a contribution to Shake-

spearian criticism. Mr. Ainslie has on the whole done his work well.

But, as Mr. J. M. Robertson has pointed out in his recently pub-

lished Croce as Shakespearean Critic (London, 1922), he has made a

few slips which somewhat confuse the argument. It is unfortunate

4 Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, by Benedetto Croce, translated by

Douglas Ainslie. London: Allen & Unwin, 1921.

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SHAKESPEARE

that Croce, in Mr. Ainslie's version, should stigmatize all biographies of Shakespeare as 'faulty', whereas the Italian word

which Croce uses is lacunosa, an epithet with which no one would quarrel. At the same time we admit the extreme difficulty of re-producing, in another tongue, all the nuances of Croce's vocabulary.

Croce opens his dissertation with a denial of any fruitful relation between the proved facts of Shakespeare's biography and his dramatic and poetic achievement. Nor does the Italian critic allow that study of the history of the poet's time or conjectures about his personal experience are of any relevance to a critical inquiry into the character or value of his work. Investigation into Shakespeare's sources or the course of his reading, into the textual history or bibliography of his publications, into contemporary conditions of the theatre, is all banished from Croce's arena.

Again, the Italian writer professes scorn for what he calls the 'exclamatory' criticism of English critics, who 'drown' Shakespeare 'beneath a flood of superlatives'. In this category he seems to place Victor Hugo at the side of Carlyle and of Swinburne; the last he regards as the arch offender. Nor does Croce view with complaisance 'those insipid moralizing professors' who profess to discover in Shakespeare's plays illustration of specific moral or philosophic doctrines. Almost all the German critics consequently come under Croce's ban. It is a relief to learn from a few lines at the close of Croce's denunciatory chapter on 'criticism' that 'some correct thinking' about Shakespeare is to be found in the pages, among older writers, of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, and Manzoni, and 'among the Dowdens, the Bradleys, and the Raleighs of to-day'.

Some pleas in arrest of judgement might easily be urged on many counts of the large indictment which Croce brings against preceding writers on Shakespeare. Few scholars will accept without much qualification his depreciatory view of biographical and textual research. A knowledge which rests on tested evidence of Shakespeare's practical affairs is necessary to the formation of any trustworthy conception of the poet's individuality or personality. Biography, which came into being at the call of mankind's commemorative instinct, can never be safely disregarded by those who seek to estimate justly and fully a dead hero's work, to whatever department of activity it belongs.

At the same time it is fair to judge Croce by his manner of

applying to Shakespeare's drama his original aesthetic theories,

rather than by his attacks on those who have approached Shake-

spearian study by different roads. Croce works on the assumption

that a poet's work is an isolated entity, and must be examined

without reference to external circumstance. It must be minutely

scrutinized in vacuo. By no other means will the critic be able to

distinguish the individual 'sentiment' which impregnates the whole

and lends it its particular form and substance. There may be appa-

rent variations in the working of the individual 'sentiment', but it

never loses its essential homogeneity. Shakespeare's individual

'sentiment' is, according to Croce, a dynamic force for ever assimilat-

ing and refashioning the dominant energies of life. It creates

for him the world in which he moves as poet and dramatist.

That world, although it give a convincing illusion of reality,

remains a world of which no one but himself has enjoyed

the vision or grasped the full significance. His dramas are the

realizations of his individual and unique endeavour to exhibit his

world at work. His art, the form in which he embodies his aim,

is created by what Croce calls the 'content' of his mind, the

character of the world which lives there. Matter and manner are

all of one piece, and although they may not always deserve the

same measure of praise, everything that fell from Shakespeare's

pen bears witness to the essential oneness of the power behind it.

Whatever may be thought of Croce's aesthetic theories, and of

their competence to solve the mystery of Shakespeare's genius,

there is no likelihood of difference of opinion respecting Croce's

triumphant success in his critical appreciations of Shakespeare's

characterization. His remarks on Macbeth and other of the great

tragedies, apart from any theorizing, abound in subtlety and pene-

tration. At whatever point the Italian critic touches the concrete

details of Shakespearian drama, he gives proof of luminous insight.

Could one eliminate the controversial element from Croce's essay

it might deserve admission to the first rank of Shakespearian

criticism.

Miss Lilian Winstanley, who has already given many proofs of

her erudite knowledge of Elizabethan Literature, breaks new ground

in an endeavour to determine the interpretation which an Elizabethan

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SHAKESPEARE

audience would set on Shakespeare's play of Hamlet at its first pro-

duction.5 She is of opinion that the Elizabethan point of view

can only be reached through 'the careful study of the history of

the time'. Shakespeare's plays should not, according to Miss

Winstanley, be studied in the light of modern psychology, but in

that of the quite different psychology of his own day. Miss Win-

stanley's original method of critical inquiry leads to startling

results.

As we understand Miss Winstanley's proposition, Shakespeare's

characters and episodes were deliberately topical in their original

intention, and only by mysterious accident did they acquire in the

eyes of critics of later days their attributes of universality. The

Elizabethan dramatist set out to fulfil certain obligations, barely

intelligible nowadays, which his audience habitually imposed upon

him. The playgoer required Shakespeare to bring on the stage

characters and fables which plainly mirrored, under a thin veil of

illusion, familiar leaders and incidents of current political life.

Miss Winstanley has studied the play of Hamlet in the light of

these assumptions. She would have us believe that the dramatist

chose the old Danish legend as the foundation of his tragedy owing

to the opportunity which the theme offered of presenting in dramatic

disguise notorious events of contemporary history. Both Shake-

speare and his audience were at the time obsessed by two political

crises. One touched the claim of James VI, King of Scotland, to

succeed to the English throne when Queen Elizabeth's long reign

should end. The other political question at urgent issue was the

fate of the Earl of Essex and his fellow conspirators. The fortunes

and character of Shakespeare's Hamlet form a commentary on these

insistent political problems which the audience was anxious for the

dramatist to discuss on the stage. We learn that traits of both

King James and the Earl of Essex are clearly visible in Shake-

speare's delineation of his Danish Prince, in whom there also

mingle some touches of the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of

Essex's friend and the dramatist's own patron. Readers must be

referred to Miss Winstanley's volume for her confirmatory evidence

5 Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. Being an examination of the

relations of the play of Hamlet to the Scottish Succession and the Essex

Conspiracy. By Lilian Winstanley. Cambridge University Press, 1921.

x + 188 pp.

of this highly original theory. At a first view there springs to

one's mind Charles Lamb's impatient comment on 'Landor's

unfeeling allegorizing away of honest Quixote' : 'He may as well

say Strap [the loyal comrade of Roderick Random in Smollett's

novel] is meant to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union,

and Random (the Scottish nation) since that Act of dubious issue.

. . . Gebir [Landor's epic], indeed, may mean the state of the Hop-

markets last month for anything I know to the contrary.' (Lamb's

letter to Southey, 1st August 1825.)

Mr. Gerald Friedlander has brought together various versions of

the old story of a Jew's loan of money to a Christian, which forms

the leading theme of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.6 He cites

at the end of his volume a scene from Lessing's sympathetic

dramatic study of Nathan der Weise, by way of contrast with what

he deems to be Shakespeare's harsh interpretation of Jewish

character. Mr. Friedlander's researches are superficial. He merely

collects material which is already familiar to students, and his

conclusions do bare justice to Shakespeare's achievement. The

brief preface by Mr. Moscovitch, the masterly interpreter of Shylock

on the stage, is not very illuminating, but some interest attaches

to the actor's suggestion that Shylock's conduct has justification.

There is no end to the speculative ingenuity which Shakespeare's

Sonnets provoke. Mr. Hubert Ord has brought together many

passages from Chaucer's works which have certain affinities in

sentiment and language with passages in Shakespeare's Sonnets.7

But the resemblances are not very close, and are hardly sufficient

to justify the conclusion that Shakespeare was familiar with

Chaucer's poetry. Mr. Ord, however, goes so far as to formulate

a theory that some of Shakespeare's Sonnets celebrate allegorically

Chaucer's fame, and that 'the rival poet' is to be identified with

either Chaucer or with Chaucer's editor of 1602, Thomas Speght.

Mr. Ord's original theory is not likely to win acceptance.

6 Shakespeare and the Jew, by Gerald Friedlander, with an introduction

by Maurice Moscovitch. London : George Routledge. New York: E. P.

Dutton, 1921. viii + 79 pp.

7 Chaucer and the Rival Poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets. A New Theory by

Hubert Ord, M.A. J. M. Dent, London and Toronto, 1921. pp. 1-63.

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Professor R. S. Conway, in his ‘New Studies of a Great Inheritance, being lectures on the modern worth of some ancient writers’ (London, John Murray, 1921), includes a study of the classical elements in Shakespeare’s Tempest (pp. 165–89). Professor Conway is on familiar ground when he finds the source of Prospero’s renunciation of his practice of magic (v. i. 33 sqq.) in Golding’s translation of Medea’s invocation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (vii, 197 sqq.). But a more original note is struck when Professor Conway claims for many single lines and phrases and for some larger issues of the plot of The Tempest indebtedness on Shakespeare’s part to Virgil. The verbal resemblances are interesting, though they hardly prove that Shakespeare borrowed directly from the great Roman poet. Professor Conway points out that some part of Gonzalo’s description of the Golden Age was anticipated by Virgil in his Georgics. Yet here Shakespeare owed nothing tangible to the Roman poet, for he was directly adapting a passage from Montaigne in Florio’s English version. The influence which Virgil may have exerted on Montaigne barely concerns Shakespeare. Professor Conway detects in Virgil’s Aeneid and in Shakespeare’s Tempest an identical conception of a benevolent Providence in control of human affairs. Prospero’s outlook on the world which Professor Conway identifies with Virgil’s scarcely stands in need of classical elucidation, and offers slender proof of Shakespeare’s study of Virgil’s epic.

Most of the apparent resemblances between classical and Shakespearian thought and phraseology may be fairly assigned to accidental coincidence. Occasionally Shakespeare assimilates classical language or sentiment at second- or third-hand. It may be admitted that, despite the wide interval which separates him from the classical text, he often comes surprisingly close to the Greek or Latin turn of phrase, but the rapprochement is attributable to Shakespeare’s sureness of literary touch. Conscious pursuit of classical models is rarely discernible.

M. de Pourtalès’ translation of Shakespeare’s subtle comedy of Measure for Measure 8 illustrates the merits and defects inherent

8 William Shakespeare. ‘Mesure pour Mesure.’ Traduction et Préface de Guy de Pourtalès. Ornements gravés sur bois par Jean-Louis Gampert. Paris: Société Littéraire de France, 1921. xxxi + 152 pp.

in all efforts to reproduce Shakespeare in a foreign tongue. M. de Pourtalès’ French style is clear and vivid, and luminously conveys to the reader Shakespeare’s general intuition. Yet Shakespeare’s subtleties of thought and expression seem often to evaporate in the French atmosphere. Something is mis∼u when the Duke’s pessimistic reflection ‘There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure’ is rendered as ‘La bonne foi est trop rare pour que les relations sociales soient sûres’. Ex uno omnia. Yet M. de Pourtalès has done his work as well as the conditions allow. In the Preface, he writes agnostically of the biographical information regarding Shakespeare. In his criticism of the play, he leaves out of account Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the Italian novelist Giraldi Cinthio, and consequently ignores Shakespeare’s marvellous and crucial remodelling of the Italian writer’s dénouement. But M. de Pourtalès shows critical insight in his comment on the philosophy of life which Shakespeare’s play embodies.

Under the title of ‘Shakespeare Treads the Boards’ Mr. M. H. Spielmann contributed to The Times Literary Supplement on ⋅1st December 1921, an interesting account of English and foreign plays which presented the poet as the leading character. A second article by Mr. Spielmann which followed on 2nd February 1922 greatly expanded the information touching this curious literary by-way. Mr. Spielmann’s researches finally showed that Shakespeare has figured in person, between the end of the eighteenth century and the present time, in no less than 69 dramatic pieces, comic as well as serious. As many as six languages, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, have been pressed into this service. It is in no way surprising that Germany should be foremost in this romantic field with 31 pieces as against 28 pieces of British or American origin.

Two English contributions to the long series of plays in which Shakespeare fills the rôle of hero have been published during the year under review. They deserve brief notice, if only as evidence of the attraction which Shakespeare’s personal history exerts on dramatic ambition.

The five ‘episodes’ which form Messrs. Rubinstein and Bax’s

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SHAKESPEARE

play of Shakespeare9 are, as is customary in this manner of work,

quite imaginary. Although the authors show signs of familiarity

with recent research into Shakespeare’s biography, they interpret

their knowledge with far greater freedom than exact scholarship

justifies. Their endeavour is to reconcile in the light of the

imagination the apparently contradictory strains of worldliness

and idealism in Shakespeare’s character. They propound a puzzle

which they can scarcely be said to have solved. Yet the theme

is illustrated with some ingenuity. The concluding ‘episode’ at

New Place in January 1616 shows Shakespeare, who has just

made his will, rejecting the admiring worship of Thomas Quiney,

the suitor of his daughter Judith, who is represented as a youth

with poetic ambitions. The dramatist will only assent to Quiney’s

marriage with his daughter on condition that the young man

forsake the Muses and devote himself to trade. It is to the

credit of the authors that their dramatic speech gives the Eliza-

bethan illusion without archaic pedantry. As Mr. Pollard says

in his Introduction: ‘It is extraordinarily difficult to make

Elizabethans talk without their talk jarring on the reader who

has even a slight acquaintance with Elizabethan English as

incongruous and impossible. The talk in this play very seldom-

jars.’

The second drama on the poet’s personality and history which

came out last year is Miss Clemence Dane’s ambitious ‘Invention’

entitled Will Shakespeare, which enjoyed a brief but chequered run

on the stage.10 Miss Dane’s style has its charms. She handles

blank-verse with spirited freedom, even if the phraseology is

often unduly elusive. Yet it may be doubted if a genuinely

artistic purpose be served by quite so bold a travesty of historic

fact. No plausible conception of Shakespeare’s character excuses

the author’s bold defiance of biographic evidence or critical

exegesis. The gloomy neurotic amorist who masquerades as Shake-

speare in Miss Dane’s play scarcely deserves his proud appellation.

9 Shakespeare. A Play in Five Episodes. By H. F. Rubinstein and

Clifford Bax. With a Preface by A. W. Pollard. London: Benn Brothers,

1921. x + 117 pp.

10 Will Shakespeare, An Invention in Four Acts, by Clemence Dane.

London: William Heinemann, 1921. viii + 131 pp.

SHAKESPEARE

79

In her characterization of Queen Elizabeth, Miss Dane has come nearer success in the dramatic interpretation of an historic personage, but everywhere else she has allowed her fancy to run riot to the distortion of historic veracity. Miss Dane shows small respect for Shakespeare's own method of dramatizing history and historic character. Shakespeare rarely travelled far from the available historical record. His imagination only created new episode or action in order to make the historic canvas live the more convincingly. Miss Dane's dramatic medley of undisciplined passion and commonplace intrigue would suffer little if the dramatis personae were deprived of their historic names and bore less familiar appellations of her own invention.

The initial publication of the recently-founded Dugdale Society is a finely-printed volume.11 The Society aims at promoting and fostering 'the study of Warwickshire History, Topography, and Archaeology by printing records and other Manuscript materials'. The book before us sheds welcome light on the municipal and social conditions amid which Shakespeare was born and bred. Forthcoming volumes will present the records of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation down to the date of Shakespeare's death, and four years beyond. There has been no earlier endeavour to print in full the minutes and accounts of the Council of the Town, which was incorporated on the 28th June 1553, scarcely eleven years before the poet's birth. Extracts have already been printed by Halliwell-Philipps, Malone, and others. But the full records are now made accessible to students for the first time, and all phases of municipal life with which Shakespeare was familiar are vividly illustrated. Mr. Fripp's Introduction is a competent performance, and directs attention to many new points in the history of Shakespeare's native place.

11 Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records 1553-1620. Transcribed by Richard Savage, Secretary and Librarian of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Deputy-Keeper of the Records of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon from 1884 to 1910. With Introduction and Notes by Edgar I. Fripp, B.A., London, late Lecturer to the London, Liverpool, and Belfast University Extensions. i, 1553-66. Oxford : Printed for the Dugdale Society, by Frederick Hall, Printer to the University, 1921.

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SHAKESPEARE

The Site of the Globe Playhouse is a thorough piece of research into a mass of extant legal records, and reflects great credit on its author, Mr. W. W. Braines, a Principal Assistant in the office of the Clerk of the London County Council.12 That Shakespeare’s famous theatre abutted on the small thoroughfare in Southwark, now known as Park Street, near the Bankside, has long been known, and in 1909 a commemorative Tablet was placed on the south side of the street, on the outer wall of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins’ brewery, which was long identified with the site of the Theatre. Subsequently Dr. C. W. Wallace claimed to deduce from newly discovered documents the disturbing conclusion that the Globe Theatre stood on the north and not on the south side of Park Street. Mr. Braines’ comprehensive inquiries have now decisively confuted Dr. Wallace’s argument, and the precise site of the Playhouse on the south side of Park Street may be regarded as authoritatively established.

12 The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark. With an Appendix by the Architect to the Council on the Architecture of the Building. Published by the London County Council [Mr. G. Topham Forrest]. London, 1921.

VII

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

[By Frederick S. Boas]

During the period between November 1920 and the close of 1921, except the comprehensive edition of Sir William Alexander's Dramatic Works,1 the contributions to the study of Elizabethan drama have taken the form of editions of individual plays or of articles in periodicals or the publications of societies. Additions have been made to our biographical and bibliographical knowledge, and problems of authorship have been, in some cases, discussed from new points of view.

Thus the anonymous play, The Warres of Cyrus King of Persia, against Antiochus King of Assyria, with the Tragicall ende of Panthaea, printed in 1594, has been claimed by Mr. W. J. Lawrence for Richard Farrant, and dated about 1578,2 on the following grounds.

Among the early manuscript-music preserved in the library at Christ Church, Oxford, is a set of part-books transcribed by Robert Dowe, and dated on the fly-leaf 1581. In this collection is a song beginning, ‘Ah, ah, alas! you salt sea-gods’; and containing these lines :

You Gods that guide the ghostes

And souls of them that fled,

Send sobs, send sighes, send grievous grones,

And strike poore Panthéa dead!

Abradad, Abradad, ah, ah !

Alas ! poore Abradad,

My spirit with thine shall lie ;

Come Death, alas! O Death most sweet!

This song is attributed in the manuscript to Farrant, and Mr. Lawrence therefore assigns to him The Warres of Cyrus. He is

1 See below, pp. 90–2.

2 The Earliest Private-Theatre Play, by W. J. Lawrence (The Times Literary Supplement, 11th August 1921).

2622

F

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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

of opinion that the lament preserved in the Christ Church MS.

was sung by Panthea in the fifth act of the play 'immediately

before stabbing herself over the body of her battle-slain husband'.

On the title-page of the 1594 quarto The Warres of Cyrus is said

to have been 'played by the children of her Maiesties Chappell',

and Mr. Lawrence therefore identifies the piece as one of those

performed during Farrant's management of the first Blackfriars

Theatre from the end of 1576 to 1580, 'probably the unnamed

play mentioned in the Revels Accounts as having been given by

Farrant's boys before the Queen at Richmond on 27th December

1578.'

These speculations are interesting, and they have this in their

favour, that the story of Panthea and Abradatas, from Xenophon's

Cyropædia, is not likely to have been treated by many hands.

But, as Mr. Lawrence himself frankly states, in the British Museum

Additional MSS. 17786, f. 91, 'a collection later than and inferior

to Dowe's', Panthea's lament is attributed to Robert Parsons,

a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, who was drowned in 1570. The

evidence of the Christ Church MS. is therefore not conclusive.

Law Sports at Gray's Inn3 requires only brief notice. It

reproduces Gesta Grayorum from the reprint in Nichols' Progresses

of Elizabeth, but students of the tract have a more accurate version

accessible in the Malone Society reprint (1914) from the original

quarto published by W. Canning in 1688. Mr. Brown's intro-

ductory matter is rambling and of small value, except in one

particular. On various grounds Bacon is credited with the author-

ship of the speeches of the six Privy Councillors in Gesta Grayorum.

Among these may have been the Lord Chancellor to 'the Prince

of Purpoole', who was played by William Johnson. Mr. Brown

has discovered that this Johnson was connected with the capias

utlegatum which Coke, as Attorney-General, cast into Bacon's

teeth in the Court of Exchequer in 1601. Sir William Noy's

Reports and Cases (1656) includes the following: 'Johnson of

Grayes-Inne recovered in debt against Bacon of Grays-Inne upon

3 Law Sports at Gray's Inn (1594). Including Shakespeare's connexion

with the Inn's [sic] of Court, the origin of the Capias Utlegatum re Coke and

Bacon . . . with a reprint of the Gesta Grayorum, by Basil Brown. Privately

printed, New York, 1921. xciv + 188 + 88 pp. 15s. net.

a bond of 400 l. Where the condition was to save harmlesse,

being surety for Bacon. And Bacon was outlawed after Judge-

ment : And a cap. utlagut. was delivered to the Sheriff in Court.'

But against this one ‘find’ there has to be set much unprofitable

and inconsecutive theorizing.

In Anthony Munday and his Books 4 Miss M. St. Clare Byrne

discusses more fully inter alia the problem of the authorship of

Fedele and Fortunio, raised incidentally in her article, The Shepherd

Tony—A Recapitulation (Modern Language Review,5 October 1920).

The difficulty caused by the varying signatures of the dedication,

‘A. M.’ in the Huntington copy and ‘M. A.’ in the Mostyn copy,

noticed in The Year's Work in English Studies, 1919-20 (p. 86

and note), remains unsolved, but Miss Byrne re-states in more

detail the arguments in favour of Munday's authorship.

There is much else of interest in her paper. She sketches from

external and internal evidence his remarkable career from 1553 to

1633 as ‘an actor, prentice, poet, spy, journalist, recusant-hunter,

pamphleteer, playwright, pageant-poet, antiquary, translator, citizen,

and draper’. His activities as a Government agent between 1584

• and 1592 in hunting down Martinists and recusants make it un-

likely, in Miss Byrne's opinion, that during this period Munday

wrote the thirteen pages of the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas

More which are in his hand. The ‘astute pursuing’ would not have

taken the risk of coming up against the Censor by dealing with

‘matters even faintly and remotely political or topical’. On the

evidence of handwriting, and of apparently topical references in

the insurrection scene to the prentice riots of June 1595, and on

f. 13 b to the scouring of Moore-ditch in 1595 (first noted by

Mr. Percy Simpson), Miss Byrne suggests 1595–6 as the probable

date for Sir Thomas More.

Apart, however, from controversial questions of authorship or

date, Miss Byrne's paper advances materially the study of Munday's

literary activities, not only as playwright but as novelist in Zelauto

and as autobiographer in Englische-Romayne Life. As she is pre-

4 Anthony Munday and his Books, by M. St. Clare Byrne (Transactions of

the Bibliographical Society, i, no. 4, pp. 225–56, March 1921).

5 Quoted, in error, as Modern Language Association in The Year's Work,

1919–20, p. 85.

F 2

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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

paring an edition of John a Kent and John a Cumber from the

autograph MS., now in the possession of Mr. Quaritch, for the

Malone Society, it is satisfactory to know that further light upon

Munday's work may be forthcoming from her researches:

In his article The 1604 Text of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus,6

Mr. Percy Simpson has made an important contribution to one of

the most difficult textual problems in Elizabethan dramatic litera-

ture. He examines a number of passages as printed in the 1604

quarto by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Bushell, and shows

conclusively from inconsistencies and confusion both in the text

and in the stage-directions that there is deep-seated corruption.

His view is that an interpolator got early to work on the play,

and that 'the manager kept pace with the interpolator by ripping

pages out of the manuscript and destroying them. . . . The result

was a piece of patchwork in which, more and more, prose supplanted

verse and comedy made inroads into a tragic theme.'

But the question is complicated by another consideration, to which

Mr. Simpson refers, but to which he does not attach, as the present

writer thinks, its full significance. In a valuable section of his

article he shows that the 1616 quarto of Doctor Faustus contains

passages omitted in the 1604 quarto which must have belonged to

the original text. Except for a few lines these so-called 'additions'

are relegated by Mr. Tucker-Brooke in his edition of Marlowe to

an appendix. He states that all the changes in the later text

are sufficiently accounted for by Henslowe's memorandum of the

payment of £4 on 22nd November 1602 to William Birde and

Samuel Rowley 'for their adicyones in doctor foste's'.

Mr. Simpson proves beyond all doubt that this is a short-sighted

view, and that in a certain number of passages the later text

retains the original reading. But there is something more to be

said. The present writer, when editing in 1908 The Taming of

a Shrew, had to examine closely the imitations in that play of

passages in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. He found that two

of the plagiarisms from Doctor Faustus were closer to the 1616

than to the 1604 text, and that another was represented only in the

6 The 1604 Text of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus,' by Percy Simpson. In

Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vii, collected by

John Bailey. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1921.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

85

later version. As The Taming of a Shrew was published first

in 1594, and was probably written about 1590, it follows that the

passages imitated must have been in Doctor Faustus as originally

acted. One of them, it is to be noted, is the opening of the prose

dialogue between Wagner and the Clown which is the first of

Mr. Tucker-Brooke's appendices.

With this confirmation from an external source of Mr. Simpson's

view of the merits of the 1616 text, founded on internal evidence,

it may be suggested that the whole argument should be pushed

further. We have been learning of late in Shakespearean criticism

to go behind the printed texts to the author's 'papers'. Let us

do the same with Marlowe. If a new text of Doctor Faustus was

issued in 1616, widely different from that printed in 1604, 1609,

and 1611, it was because a manuscript, or possibly a stray copy of

a sixteenth-century printed edition, closer to the original playhouse

version, had come into the publisher's hands. As the 1616 quarto

was issued by John Wright, who had acquired the copyright from

Bushell, and who had published the quartos of 1609 and 1611,

it was evidently intended to supersede them. It ought in future

to be taken as the basis of editions of Doctor Faustus, and the 1604

quarto, with whose imperfections Mr. Simpson has so faithfully

dealt, should be looked upon as only a secondary authority.

While Mr. Simpson has been putting in a plea for the 1616 text

of Doctor Faustus, the writer of a German monograph, Margarete

Thimme, has been a more whole-hearted champion of a still later

Marlowe issue, the 1633 quarto of The Jew of Malta.7 She takes

the view that when Thomas Heywood in his epistle dedicatory

speaks of the play as being 'newly brought to the Presse', he means

that it is being republished; and she concludes that the 1633 quarto

is based upon the 1594 edition of the play entered for publication

by Nicholas Ling and Thomas Millington, of which no copy has

survived. However this may be, there is force in her contention

that so able and experienced a man of the theatre as Heywood

would not have edited and provided with prologues and epilogues

a corrupt edition of a play which in its own age was 'thought

7 Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta': Stil- und Echtheitsfragen, von Margarete

Thimme (Studien zur englischen Philologie, ed. Lorenz Morsbach, lxi). Max

Niemeyer, Halle a. S. 1921. xi+47 pp.

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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

second unto none’. From a detailed examination of the metre,

diction, and syntax in the five acts she comes to the conclusion

that they are uniform throughout, and that they are consistent with

Marlowe’s authorship of the whole play. Fräulein Thimme has

done a useful piece of work, though the problem is one that cannot

be decided only on the formal evidences with which her monograph

deals.

An important addition to the documentary materials bearing

on Marlowe’s career has been made by Mr. Ford K. Brown, and

communicated to The Times Literary Supplement.8 Mr. Brown,

a Rhodes Scholar resident at Exeter College, Oxford, found that

Harleian MS. 6848, f. 154, though unsigned and unendorsed, was

in the same hand as Harleian 6849, ff. 218–19, the letter by

Thomas Kyd to Sir John Puckering, discovered by the present

writer in 1899 and reproduced in facsimile in The Works of

Thomas Kyd. Harleian 6848, f. 154 is without doubt another

letter from Kyd to Puckering. It contains charges against Marlowe

of ‘monstruous opinions’ similar to those which are rehearsed in

the notorious ‘note’ of the informer Richard Baines. It also

refers to his ‘other rashnes in attempting soden pryvie iniuries to-

men’, and concludes with the remarkable statement : ‘He wold

p(er)swade wth men of quallitie to goe unto the K[ing] of Scotts

. . . where if he had liud he told me when I saw him last he

meant to be.’

In connexion with the question of Marlowe’s ‘Atheism’, on

which the new Kyd letter gives fresh details, Miss Ethel Seaton

has pointed out in The Times Literary Supplement9 that ‘the defiant

and challenging prayer uttered by the Turk Orcanes to the Chris-

tians’ God ‘in Tamburlaine, Part II, Act II, iii. 2893–2921, is not an in-

vention of the dramatist, but has a striking resemblance to a passage

in.Bonfinius, Rerum Ungaricarum, Dec. iii, Lib. vi, where the defeat

of the treaty-breaking Christians by the Turks at the battle of

Varna in 1444 is described.

8 Marlowe and Kyd. A letter from Ford K. Brown in The Times Literary

Supplement, 2nd June 1921. See further a letter on the same subject from

F. S. Boas, ibid., 30th June 1921.

9 Marlowe and his Authorities. A letter from Ethel Seaton in The Times

Literary Supplement, 16th June 1921.

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

87

The Malone Society has issued a reprint, prepared by Mr. A. E. H.

Swaen, with the assistance of the General Editor, Dr. W. W. Greg,

of Robert Greene's The Scottish History of James the Fourth.10

In the preparation of the reprint use has been made of two of the

four known copies of the 1598 quarto, that in the British Museum,

which wants leaf A 4, and the Dyce copy at South Kensington,

which contains this leaf. The reprint contains a list of doubtful

and irregular readings, exclusive of those recorded by previous

editors, and a list of characters, with notes on some of the names

prefixed to speeches or used in stage-directions.

In the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, December

1920, Dr. W. W. Greg announced the discovery of a copy of

a hitherto unsuspected first edition of Ben Jonson's Every Man

out of his Humour.11 Two editions of the play, dated 1600, one

printed for William Holme and the other for Nicholas Linge,

have been previously known. But a copy bought by the British

Museum in 1908, bearing Holme's imprint and dated 1600, has

been identified by Dr. Greg as belonging to an edition earlier than

either of these. It has the collation A–R instead of A–O only,

-and the title-page differs from that of the other Holme issue,

of which there are copies in the Bodleian and Dyce libraries,

by having an oblong ornament instead of the device of the printer,

Peter Short. By a comparison of the Museum quarto with the

Bodley-Dyce quarto Dr. Greg gives conclusive bibliographical proof

of the priority of the former.

The Museum copy is a poor one, and among other defects lacks

leaves R 3–4 at the end. It is fortunate, therefore, that since

Dr. Greg's article appeared, two better copies have been reported

in the United States, one in the library of Mr. H. E. Huntington

and the other in the Boston Public Library. The Malone Society

reprint of Holme's first edition of the play12 has been prepared by

Mr. F. P. Wilson and Dr. Greg from the Museum copy supple-

10 The Scottish History of James the Fourth, 1598. The Malone Society

Reprints, 1921. pp. xi + A–K in fours.

11 The First Edition of Ben Jonson's 'Every Man out of his Humour', by

W. W. Greg (Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, i, no. 3, pp. 153–60,

Dec. 1920).

12 Every Man out of his Humour, 1600. The Malone Society Reprints,

1920 (issued in 1921). pp. viii + A–R in fours.

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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

mented by photographs from the Boston copy of all those pages

which are in any way defective. The reprint includes collotype

reproductions of the title-pages of both of Holme's editions and of

Linge's quarto.

Another Jonsonian novelty is what appears to be a first draft of

the Preludium to the Epode included in The Forrest. It consists

of sixteen lines, printed by Mr. Thorn-Drury from a seventeenth-

century manuscript in A Little Ark.13 The two versions are

entirely different except in the last line and a half, where there

is only a slight variation. The text in The Forrest reads :

Now my thought takes wing

And now an Epode to deepe eares I sing

and in the manuscript :

Now our Muse takes winge

And now an Epode to deepe eares wee singe

In Modern Language Notes (March 1921) Mr. W. P. Mustard

adds some supplementary notes to those contained in Dr. Lynn

Harris's edition of Jonson's Catiline (Yale Studies in English, 1916).

He shows inter alia that the Consul's speech (iii. 1-50) is closely

modelled on passages in Cicero's Oration on the second Agrarian

law.

In the February number Mr. Alwin Thaler points out that

Richard Brome, whom Ben Jonson mentions in the Induction to

Bartholomew Fair as his 'man ' and his 'servant', is probably the

Richard Brome included among the Queen of Bohemia's players in

a royal warrant of 30th June 1628. He passed his apprenticeship

on the stage, and it was in this sense that Jonson called him servant.

In the June number Mr. Thaler calls attention to the light

thrown by the Preludium to Thomas Goffe's Careless Shepherdess,

acted at the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629, on the rates of

admission to playhouses, the competition of amateur dramatists

with professionals, and other aspects of theatrical history.

In A Little Ark, mentioned above, Mr. Thorn-Drury has had

printed from manuscript thirty lines by 'Henerie Parker', addressed

'To his hono'd frend Mr Phillip Massinger, having not had that

13 A Little Ark. Containing sundry pieces of seventeenth-century verse,

collected and edited by G. Thorn-Drury. London : P. J. and A. E. Dobell,

1921. viii+57 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

iust applause for one of his playes weh was due to him.' The lines

begin :

Canst thou be troubled at the hissing croude?

tush': let them stretch theire neckes, and hisse as lowde

At that weh doth transcend theire valuaçon,

as that weh is belew, theire estimacon.

The piece evidently refers to the failure of one of the two plays

whose ill fortune was lamented by Massinger himself in the

prologue to The Guardian (1633) :

After twice putting forth to sea, his fame

Shipwreck'd in either, and his once-known name

In two years silence buried.

The plays were probably The Emperor of the East and Believe as

You List, belonging to 1631.

Early in 1633 there had been privately performed before

Charles I by the Queen and Ladies of Honour The Shepheards

Paradise, by Walter Montague. Hence the severity of the sentence

on William Prynne, who, in the table of contents of his Histrio-

mastix, had spoken disparagingly of women actors. Montague's

pastoral was published in 1659, but a folio manuscript of it is

extant, from which Mr. Thorn-Drury has printed in A Little Ark

a hitherto unknown prologue and songs between the acts. In the

prologue, which takes the form of a dialogue between Diana and

Apollo, Montague pays a deftly-turned compliment to the Queen.

Apollo declares that

all knowing Iove

Would have stole down arm'd wth the God of Love,

But Iuno iealous, wth more reason now

Then e're before, would not this stealth allow;

And Diana responds :

Iuno did well, her husband would have seene

A Paradise contain'd in such a Queene :

He might have own'd this as his propper place

Alledging Heaven was truly in her face.

The so-called 'Songs' are, as Mr. Thorn-Drury says, 'by way of

being comments on the text' of the play, and are written in rhymed

couplets. They run smoothly enough, and do not support the

charge made by a contemporary'that 'th'English of Watt Montague'

is 'more hard then French'.

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ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

The most important contribution to the study of the Elizabethan drama during the past year is the first volume of the edition of Sir William Alexander's Poetical Works 14 by Professors L. E. Kastner and H. B. Charlton. This volume, containing the dramatic works, has been issued separately on the sufficient ground ‘that the material did in fact constitute a volume with a unity and completeness of its own; and that it was that section of his poems to which the author himself attached most importance’. Volume II, containing the rest of Alexander's compositions in verse, will follow at an early date.

The editors have reprinted the text of The Monarchicke Tragedies (Crosus, Darius, The Alexandraean, Julius Caesar) in the last version issued during the author's lifetime, that of the Recreations with the Muses (1637). In their apparatus criticus they give all the variants in the earlier editions from Darius published alone in 1603 to the 1616 edition of the four tragedies. As the 1603 Darius differs in almost every line from the final version it is printed in full.

The editors feel it necessary to justify such elaborate treatment of writings for which they do not claim ‘great aesthetic merit’. They make out an excellent case on various grounds. Alexander's poetry is ‘the first literary counterpart of the political union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the embodiment of an Anglo-Scottish confederacy in letters. But in this confederacy England established herself as the predominant partner, and Alexander showed an increasing eagerness to purge away the outward marks of his Northern ancestry’. This resulted, in the oft-repeated revisions of his works, in ‘a progressive weeding out from his diction of everything smacking of the archaic, the affected, the pedantic, and particularly of the provincial, whether ær in vocabulary, syntax, or pronunciation’. There could not be a more illuminating example of the value of linguistic investigation, not merely to the philologist but to the student of literature, than the spectacle of this remorseless elimination by Alexander of the Scottish element

14 The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, ed. by L. E. Kastner, M.A., and H. B. Charlton, M.A. Volume the First. The Dramatic Works. With an Introductory Essay on the Growth of the Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy. Manchester : at the University Press. Longmans, Green & Co., 1921. ccxix + 482 pp. 28s. net.

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in his style. By means of their textual apparatus, and the additional elucidation furnished in their notes, the editors enable us to follow the process in detail. And the irony of it is that all the while Alexander is cutting his own throat. For it is just the dialect words and forms and the archaisms that break up the glossy surface of his style and do something to relieve its monotony. Similarly he robs his versification of any elements of variety by regularizing the stress arrangement, substituting end-stopped for run-on lines, and getting rid of double rhymes.

But if linguistically Alexander's plays are a document on the relations of Scottish and English idiom, they have something of cosmopolitan significance in the sphere of dramatic art. It is to elucidate this that the editors have included in the volume a long and elaborately documented introductory essay on 'the growth of the Senecan tradition in Renaissance tragedy'. The essay should be read in full by every student of Renaissance literature; it is a masterly monograph which might well be issued separately. Here it is possible to mention only the points which bear upon Alexander's work. The contrasted development of the Senecan tradition in Italy and France is traced at length, and is summed up thus: 'France makes Seneca more academic than he was, Italy develops his theatrical leanings. The French are mainly concerned with literary form and moral content, the Italians with spectacular show and melodramatic effect. In France action is almost dispensed with, stirring incident is banned, dialogue becomes monologue, sententiae are expanded to sermons, language acquires the perpetual gloss of rhetoric—in short a French Senecan drama is drama in little but name.'

Professors Kastner and Charlton seek to show that 'the main march of the English Seneca was along the road which the Italians had first struck out', but that he went much further on this common track than the Italians, and that 'by so doing he impelled a relatively isolated group to seek more classical paths with France for guide'. The 'main march' of this English Seneca, incorporating more and more of popular elements, is traced successively through the translators of the Tenue Tragedies (1581), the Senecan dramatists of the Inns of Court, professional playwrights of the Kyd School, University dramatists like Gager, and finally Ben Jonson, who attempted in vain 'the reformation of the people's Seneca

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without destroying his popularity'. The section on Jonson is the

most penetrating exposition that has hitherto appeared of his exact

place in the Senecan Movement and in theatrical cross-currents

generally.

Contrasted with these various phases of the popular Senecan

movement on Italian lines is the work of 'a narrow coterie of poets'

bound together for the most part by personal ties, who translated

French Seneca or wrote plays on his model not for the theatre but

for the study. Kyd as translator of Garnier's Cornélie belongs to

this as well as to the Italianate group. The other leading members

are the Countess of Pembroke, Daniel, Fulke Greville, and Sir

William Alexander. One and all they choose their subjects from

classical history, not to thrill spectators or readers, in Greville's

words, 'with variety and unexpected encounters', but to enrich

memory and judgement with a long-drawn scheme of sententious

moralizing of which the Chorus becomes the chief mouthpiece. It

is because Alexander's Monarchike Tragedies, written throughout

(save for the choric parts) in the alternately rhyming decasyllables,

which were the favourite metre of the group, illustrate on the

widest scale the characteristics of French Seneca in Britain that

they have the interest attaching to the most representative example

of any literary type. It is this that justifies a monumental publica-

tion that does honour to the two editors, to the Manchester

University Press, and to the Scottish Text Society which has lent

its co-operation.

A play which hitherto had remained in manuscript is The Welsh

Embassador, now printed for the Malone Society, and edited by

Professor H. Littledale and Dr. W. W. Greg.15 The MS., which

was formerly in the Phillipps collection, is now in the Cardiff

Public Library. It consists of nineteen folio leaves, and has

suffered from damp, 'the lower margin of each leaf being more or

less decayed, and a portion of the text lost on almost every page'.

It is probably in the hand not of the author but of a professional

scribe, who appears to have added later the marginal warnings to

the actors—a proof that the play was prepared for the stage, and

may even have belonged to the small extant group of prompt copies.

15 The Welsh Embassador. The Malone Society Reprints, 1920 (issued in

1921). viii + 71 pp.

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93

The Welsh Embassador, which numbers 2310 lines, seems from a reference in 1. 2162 to have been written in or about 1623. The name of the author is unknown. It is one of the few seventeenth-century plays dealing, at least nominally, with an episode from the Anglo-Saxon period. Its central figure is Athelstane, not as hero and lawgiver, but as a royal light o’ love. He is under a contract to marry Armante, daughter of the Duke of Colchester, who has borne him a son. But his fancy has now veered to Carintha, wife of Penda, the Duke of Cornewall’s son. To secure her as his bride he has ordered one of his captains, Voltimar, to stab Penda during a battle on French soil. Voltimar only feigns compliance, and returns to court in disguise with the King’s two brothers, Eldred and Edmond, who are both reported slain. Penda assumes the part of an ambassador from the Welsh King Howell, who sends tribute to Athelstane, while Eldred figures as his compatriot and follower, and Edmond as his Irish footman. The King tries to bring about a match between Armante and the ‘embassador’ till ‘the comedy of Welsh disguises ’ is revealed, Penda is reunited to his wife, and Athelstane makes Armante his queen.

The most interesting feature of the play consists in the Welsh and Irish dialects spoken by the ‘embassador’ and his men, which will repay fuller annotation than is possible in a Malone Society reprint. A Clown, with an ambition to be a Chronicler, supplies an element of very tedious fooling.

Another manuscript play has been edited from British Museum Egerton MS. 1994 by Professor Schoell, of Chicago. It is the anonymous drama which A. H. Bullen printed in A Collection of Old English Plays, vol. iii (1884), under the title of The Distracted Emperor, but which the present editor calls simply and preferably Charlemagne.16 In addition to the text Professor Schoell supplies an introduction, notes, an account of the sources, and an appendice critique, all of which are in French.

His object in re-editing the play is twofold. In the first place he wishes to correct imperfections in the text as printed by Bullen,

16 Charlemagne (The Distracted Emperor), Drame Élisabéthain Anonyme. Edition Critique avec Introduction et Notes par Franck L. Schoell, Professeur à l’Université de Chicago. Princeton: Princeton University Press. London : Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1920. 157 pp. 12s. 6d. net.

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who 'a mal lu certains mots, modifié constamment l'orthographie originale, tout en laissant entendre qu'il la respectait, négligé quelques indications scéniques'. Professor Schoell's variations from the text of his predecessors, other than purely orthographical, are given in his appendice critique, and we are indebted to him for restoring in a number of cases the original reading. He has also given a few stage directions omitted by Bullen. But he has not noticed that some of these, e.g. Hoboyes, after I. i. 155, are not in the hand of the original scribe, but have been added later, and are pro tanto evidence that the MS. was used as a prompt copy.

Professor Schoell, however, frankly states that in spite of his emendations his edition does not present 'aucune modification vraiment essentielle au texte même de M. Bullen'. His principal aim is to prove that Charlemagne was written by George Chapman. Bullen, after one or two other guesses, had himself stated his impression 'that Chapman had the chief hand' in the play, but did not work the matter out in detail. This Professor Schoell does at length in the introduction and the notes. In the former he gives rather more weight than is due to the fact that Charlemagne is, as he puts it, a chronigue historique based like Busy and Byron on a French subject. It is a far cry from the court of Charlemagne to that of Henry II and Henry IV of France. Professor Schoell is on firmer ground when he compares the character-drawing in the play with that in Chapman's undoubted works, and when he finds analogies between them and Charlemagne in thought, phrasing, and rhythm. These analogies are copiously illustrated in the notes, and their cumulative effect is undeniably striking. Professor Schoell has considerably strengthened the case for Chapman's authorship, but there are questions concerned with the provenance and history of the manuscript which need further discussion. In any event this scholarly and comely edition of the play is welcome.

The Captives ; or, The Lost Recovered, another of the plays printed by Bullen from Egerton MS. 1994, in A Collection of Old English Plays, vol. iv (1885), has been re-edited by an American scholar, Professor A. C. Judson.17

17 The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered. Written by Thomas Heywood. Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary, by Alexander Corbin Judson, Associate Professor of English in the University of Texas. New

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95

format, is the first work published under the auspices of the

Elizabethan Club of Yale College, in memory of Francis Bergen,

a graduate, who was accidentally killed in May 1917, during his

period of military training, and whose father has instituted at Yale

'the Francis Bergen Lectures' on recent English Literature and

Drama, and recent advances and achievements in Science. Though

the MS. has no title, its identification by Bullen with the 'new

Play, called The Captive ; or, the Lost Recovered : written by Hay-

ward' [i.e. Thomas Heywood] mentioned by Sir Henry Herbert

in his Office-Book, 3rd September 1624, has been generally accepted

by scholars.

Professor Judson has collated Bullen's edition with rotographs

of the manuscript ; he has thus been able to include several passages

which Bullen found himself unable to read, and has also altered

his readings at a number of points. All important departures

from the text in the Bullen edition have been indicated in the

foot-notes. As the handwriting of the manuscript is exceptionally

difficult, Professor Judson has done valuable service by his emenda-

tions, and has made available a more correct text. But, like Pro-

fessor Schoell in his edition of Charlemagne, he has not always

distinguished the stage-directions, which are numerous, in the

original script from those added by the prompter.

Professor Judson, from an examination of some of the corrections

in the text, makes out a strong case for its being autograph. This

claim is supported by the fact that the following piece in MS. Eger-

ton 1994, Calisto, which is a canto of episodes from Heywood's

Golden Age and Silver Age, is in the same hand. It is hard to

think of any one employing an amanuensis with such a villainous

'fist'.

The main part of the 'Introduction' deals with Heywood's

skilful management of his sources, the Rudens of Plautus and

a novella of Masuccio of Salerno. The 'Notes' include a number

of illustrative quotations from both sources, and a Glossary and

Bibliography complete an excellent edition.

Another play which on internal evidence has been claimed for

Heywood, Appius and Virginia, is discussed in The Modern

Haven: Yale University Press. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford

University Press, 1921. 180 pp. 12s. 6d. net.

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Language Review, by Mr. A. M. Clark.18 He elaborates the argu-

ment of Rupert Brooke in John Webster and the Elizabethan

Drama that Appius and Virginia, though published under Web-

ster's name in 1654 and 1659, was written by Heywood, and that

Webster at most 'shortened and made more dramatic the very

beginning of the play, and heightened, or even rewrote, the trial

scene (iv. i)'. His only criticism is that he traces Webster's hand

'more frequently but not more integrally than in these two scenes '.

In support of the attribution to Heywood he examines the con-

struction of the play, the character-drawing, the style, metre and

vocabulary, and concludes that Appius and Virginia was a com-

panion piece to Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, afterwards hastily

revised and cut about by Webster.

But what Webster thus loses on the roundabouts he pulls up

on the swings, if we accept Mr. Dugdale Sykes' thesis 19 that the

comedy Anything for a Quiet Life, published as Middleton's in

1662, is largely the work of the more powerful dramatist. Mr.

Sykes bases his claim on 'clear traces of [Webster's] style and

vocabulary as well as numerous passages bearing a close resem-

blance to passages in his acknowledged plays'. He also instances

borrowings from the Arcadia, and from Overbury's Characters

(1615 edition), which may be paralleled in The Duchess of Malfi

and The Devil's Law Case.

In another article 20 Mr. Sykes supports the view that The Queen,

or the Excellency of her Sex, printed anonymously in 1653, is from

the pen of John Ford. Professor Bang, of Louvain, who reprinted

the play in 1906, ascribed it to Ford, and his verdict has been

endorsed by Mr. Stuart P. Sherman in Modern Language Notes,

vol. xxiii. By a comparison of the vocabulary and phraseology of

The Queen with those of Ford's undoubted plays, Mr. Sykes places

his authorship beyond reasonable question, though he admits that

18 The Authorship of 'Appius and Virginia', by Arthur M. Clark (The

Modern Language Review, xvi. i, January 1921).

19 A Webster-Middleton Play : 'Anything for a Quiet Life', by H. Dugdale

Sykes (Notes & Queries, 3, 10, 17 September 1921).

20 Ford's Posthumous Play, 'The Queen' (Notes & Queries, 11th and 18th

December 1920).

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97

the piece exhibits 'scarcely a trace of the tragic power and psychological insight' of his greater dramas.

By the use of kindred methods he attempts to find Field's hand in parts of some of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher folios.21

These are the two first 'Triumphs' of Four Plays in One, Act III and IV of The Queen of Corinth and Acts I and V of The Knight of Malta. The parallels in phrase and imagery that he finds between them and Field's undoubted plays are very striking.

A far less plausible attempt is made by Mr. William Wells to fix the authorship of another play, The Birth of Merlin, assigned by its publisher in 1662 to Shakespeare and Rowley.22

There is no sign of Shakespeare's hand in the piece. Middleton and Dekker are among those who have been suggested as Rowley's real collaborators.

Mr. Wells makes the novel claim that Beaumont and Fletcher were the chief authors of the play. He bases his view on resemblances between the main plot of The Birth of Merlin and that of Cupid's Revenge, both derived from Sidney's Arcadia, and on parallelisms of phrase. He thinks that there was a play—'X'—which formed the basis of both pieces. The argument is laboured and does not carry conviction.

In The Riddle of 'Philaster'23 Mr. W. J. Lawrence sets forth a new theory of the relation of Quarto 1 of the play to the later Quartos. He rejects the view 'that Philaster was originally produced by the King's Men, c. 1608, and that the variants of Quarto 1 represent some unexplainable sophistication of the true Beaumont and Fletcher text', due to a scribe in the audience. It is taken, in his opinion, from a careless transcript of a genuine playhouse copy. His theory is 'that Philaster was originally written by Fletcher for some company of boy-players with the help of some journeyman playwright, and that on the collapse of the company the play was purchased by the King's Men, and handed over to Beaumont for revision'.

21 Nathaniel Field's Work in the 'Beaumont and Fletcher' Plays (Notes & Queries, 19th, 26th Feb.; 5th, 12th March 1921).

22 The Birth of Merlin, by William Wells (Modern Language Review, xvi, 2nd April 1921).

23 The Riddle of 'Philaster', by W. J. Lawrence (The Times Literary Supplement, 17th November 1921).

2622

G

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These views are mainly based on the occurrence in Quarto 1 of

' technical stage-directions beyond the powers of any layman of the

shorthand writing order to add. Not only that, but some of these

directions distinctly convey that the play had originally been pro-

duced at a private theatre by some company of boy-players before

the close of 1609'. Mr. Lawrence contends that in the public

theatres no stage monarch would have appeared unheralded by

trumpets, but that in the less roomy private theatres cornets were

substituted for the louder instruments. As there is no mention of

trumpets in Quarto 1 on the two occasions where the King is

heralded, he holds that the piece must have been written originally

for boy-players, and that it did not pass into the possession of the

King's Men till 1613, when Beaumont altered and improved the

dénouement. Mr. Lawrence's speculations are ingenious, but they

rest upon a slender and uncertain basis.

In a later article 24 Mr. Lawrence deals with the presentation of

'the first independent theatre masque, otherwise Middleton and

Rowley's The World Tost at Tennis'. He gives reasons for his

view that the masque, though 'prepar'd for his Maiesties Enter-

tainment at Denmarke House', was, nevertheless, not performed at

Court, and calls attention to the fact that the entry of the piece on

the Stationers' Register, 4th July 1620, describes it as 'acted at

the Princes Armes by the Prince his higghners seruantes'. It is

surprising to find a performance at an inn by a London professional

company at so late a date. Neither this masque, nor The Sun's

Darling, by Ford and Dekker, given at the Phoenix in March

1624, appear to have been produced in full court form. Nabbes'

Microcosmus (printed 1637) may have been the first masque pre-

sented in a theatre with movable scenery.

Two important articles in Studies in Philology show that even

during the heyday of Puritan domination, 1642–60, the activities

of the theatre were less completely suppressed than has been

generally believed. In Notes on Puritanism and the Stage (April

1921. Mr. Thornton S. Graves, after quoting a number of un-

24 Early Substantive Masques (The Times Literary Supplement, 8th December

1921).

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99

familiar censures of plays and players by early Stuart writers,

reprints from John Rowe’s Tragi-Comœdia (1653) the Brief Narra-

tive of the Play Acted at Witney the third of February, 1652. This

‘Brief Narrative’ tells with lively detail how, while a number of

countrymen, who had already performed in other Oxfordshire villages,

were acting Mucedorus in a crowded chamber in the White Hart

Inn, the floor gave way, and many of the spectators were killed or

hurt. In this event Rowe discovers ‘the Wonderfull hand of God’,

but his narrative is an unwilling testimony to the popularity of

acting in rural England during the Commonwealth. Mr. Graves

further cites pleas for the theatre, and attacks on its enemies, from

many works issued between 1649 and 1660.

Mr. Hyder E. Rollins in the same periodical (July 1921) in A

Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama,

goes for his material to ‘the huge collection of news-books,

pamphlets, and single sheets amassed during the years 1640–60 by

the London printer George Thomason’, and now preserved in the

British Museum. Though he was concerned in his researches with

the history of the ballad rather than of the drama, he has amassed

a number of new facts which no student of the seventeenth-century

stage can neglect. He gives accounts from the contemporary news-

sheets of surreptitious performances at the Fortune, Red Bull,

Salisbury Court, and Cockpit theatres, and of hitherto unrecorded

raids by soldiers to stop them, especially after the drastic anti-stage

ordinance of 9th February 1647/8. Specially interesting are the

extracts from Mercurius Pragmaticus and The Man in the Moon

concerning the raid on a play at the Red Bull on 21st January

1649/50 ; and from The Public Intelligencer, 14th–21st January 1656,

telling how the Newcastle Justices punished players. In another

news-sheet Mr. Rollins has discovered the remarkable fact that the

actors at Salisbury Court dared to advertise a performance on

6th October 1647, of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King,

which was naturally stopped by the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs. A

later raid on the Red Bull on 14th September 1655 and the levy

of gages in lieu of a fine of five shillings on the women in the

audience are amusingly described in The Weekly Intelligencer, and

in one of the ballads in Sportive Wit (1656), which also includes

a lampoon on Davenant, ‘How Daphne payes his Debts’, in which

2

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he asserts his resolve to become Master of the Revels, and to present

'Masques

Made à la mode de France'

at Pothecaries Hall. But the time was at hand when it would no longer be necessary to use 'masque' by way of subterfuge for stage-play, and when performances could again take place without danger of raids by the military authorities.

VIII

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

POETRY AND PROSE

[By H. J. C. Grierson and Arthur Melville Clark]

Spenser and his circle figure less prominently in the publications of 1921 than of 1920, but the historical allusions in and behind his allegorical poetry continue to stimulate the activity of American scholars. Miss A. R. Snell (Modern Language Notes, xxxvi, 182-3) returns to the much debated allegory of Muiopotmos, and gives further reasons for identifying Clarion with Spenser himself in opposition to suggestions that he is Raleigh. Attempts to solve the riddle of this poem must fail if their authors ignore the important and elaborate genealogy of the Spider.

The Virtue of Temperance in the Faerie Queene (Studies in Philology, July 1921) is an attempt by Mr. Frederick Morgan Padelford to show by a detailed analysis how closely Spenser in his Second Book keeps to the Aristotelian doctrine. There is nothing really new in it, except perhaps the ingenious discoveries of parallels to the Ethics: it performs for the Legend of Temperance very much what Ruskin did for the Legend of Holiness in an appendix to The Stones of Venice.

Messrs. R. G. Whigam and O. F. Emerson (Sonnet Structure in Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’: Studies in Philology, July 1921), believing that ‘too little attention has been paid to the varied and interesting forms used by Sidney’, have amply made up for this neglect by counting the syllables and tabulating the rhyme schemes, &c. of the sohnet sequence and in Sidney’s miscellaneous poetry.

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Mrs. Stopes's article (Modern Language Review, July 1921) on

Thomas Edwards, the obscure author of the two Ovidian para-

phrases, Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus, is a most ingenious

attempt to produce a biographical sketch from the merest hints

and chance phrases. Yet one does feel that she almost establishes

the fact that Thomas was the younger brother of the author of

Palamon and Arcite, and a gentleman at court in the nineties of

the sixteenth century : there is nothing in the evidence presented

to compel our acquiescence, but it is sufficiently plausible to pro-

voke, as Mrs. Stopes hopes, others whose notes may cover the same

ground, to add their findings to her own. One can hardly accept,

however, the suggestion that the Aetion of Colin Clout's come home

again is Edwards : his verse is rather shambling and his rhymes

too rude to deserve even from Spenser, whom Thomas Edwards

seems to have regarded as his master, such generous admiration.

On the other hand, Mrs. Stopes has a good case in identifying the

'Edwards' who wrote two poems in a Bodleian MS. with Thomas.

One is left with the impression that more should be known of this

man, rather, however, on account of his allusions to Shakespeare,

Spenser, Marlowe, Daniel, and others, than because of his poetic

qualities.

Milton has been the subject of much critical investigation by

English, American, and Continental scholars during 1921. The

interest in his thought and character, in the light thrown on his

poems by a study of De Doctrina Christiana (so long neglected

from this point of view), and the prose pamphlets, has grown

steadily of late years. The present writer contributed a short

study of Milton's relation to orthodox Protestant theology to

Hastings' Dictionary of Theology (vol. viii, 1915) and M. Denis

Saurat's much more exhaustive work was treated in Volume I of

The Year's Work. He has supplemented this by an article in the

Revue Germanique (1921) on Les Sources anglaises de la Pensée de

Milton and a pamphlet on Milton et le Zohar (1921-2). In the

first he shows the close affinity between Milton's thought regarding

the materiality of the soul and its participation in the death of

the body—to be recreated at the Resurrection—with the thoughts

and arguments of the book Man's Mortality, to which Masson

drew attention. This work expresses the views of a group of

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103

advanced thinkers, referred to in Edwards’ Gangraena, the names of three of whom are known. Dr. Saurat conjectures that Milton knew the first edition 1643-4, was in sympathy with the authors, and probably influenced the changes in expression and still more in tone—which becomes more religious, if no more orthodox—of the edition of 1655, and is responsible for the increase in the number of citations from the Fathers. In the pamphlet Dr. Saurat goes on to show that much of Milton’s thought may be traced to a study of the Zohar, the doctrines of the Cabbala. A writer in Eng-lische Studien, January 1920, dealt with the indebtedness of Blake to the same source for some of his mythology. Milton, Saurat points out, has neglected the mythology ; for him the Zohar was ‘une mine d’idées philosophiques’. The discovery has qualified Saurat’s regard for ‘l’originalité de Milton comme penseur’ but increased the importance of Milton as in his time ‘le représentant de l’esprit moderne’, and his interest as a channel for ideas which reached Blake. But Blake died two years after the discovery of the De Doctrina.

The fresh interest in the thought and character of Milton is not confined to France. The Swedish scholar S. B. Liljegren’s Studies in Milton,1 which has come to hand only since this survey was begun, and Mutschmann’s Der andere Milton,2 have de-veloped (the latter in apparently rather truculent style), in opposition to what is taken to be the English view of Milton as a Christian and Puritan poet, the thesis that he is, rather, an extreme representative of the same Renaissance type as Raleigh and Mar-lowe, egotistic, unscrupulous, and ultimately a Stoic rather than a Christian, his acceptance of the supernatural elements in his creed having become purely conventional or poetic. Liljegren’s is a remarkable book. It is written in English, but the sentence-structure is often more German than English, especially in the more philosophical paragraphs. The most important, and largest, portion of the book deals with the trustworthiness of Milton’s statements about himself, and consists in a carefully documented proof of the extreme improbability of Milton’s having actually visited Galileo in Italy, so that his statements in the Areopagitica that he ‘found and visited the famous Galileo grown old’ would be an exaggeration due to a desire to magnify his own importance.

1 Lund : Gleerup, 1918. 2 Bonn : Schroeder, 1920.

Liljegren also holds that the balance of the evidence is in favour

of the contention (to which Johnson refers in his Life) that Milton

and Dugard the printer interpolated into the Εἰκὼν Βασιλική the

Pamela prayer from Sidney's Arcadia, the use of which Milton

then flung at the dead King in such petulant and truculent terms.

To the present writer the latter case seems still not quite proved ;

and he would demur to the inference from it, even if true, regard-

ing Milton's character as a whole and its reflection in his work.

Man is too complex an animal to be read from one or two actions,

and Liljegren insufficiently stresses what is probably the chief factor

—politics, especially revolutionary politics. The purest idealists

have found themselves before long, unscrupulous Machiavellians

in revolutionary conditions. ‘Faction seldom leaves a man honest,

however it find him.’ Some statements of Milton are in Liljegren's

general argument unduly forced. If Milton contends that justice,

as an active virtue, stands higher than the contemplative virtue

truth, it is hardly fair to argue that Milton means that truth may

be sacrificed to justice. Mutschmann, who underlines Liljegren's

contentions and paints Milton as a non-moral egotist of the kind

glorified by Nietzsche, argues that Milton served virtue only as a

means to fame—Liljegren perhaps approaches this too—and gives

as proof the lines:

Love virtue ; she alone is free,

She can teach ye how to climb

Higher than the sphery chime.

So that Plato, whom Milton is following, when he speaks of the

ascent of the soul by dialectic to the Idea of the Good is thinking

of the pursuit of fame!

Liljegren and Mutschmann have been criticized; the former

sympathetically but decisively by Walter Fischer in Englische

Studien, May 1918. Liljegren's reply, and a note on his conception

of Satan by Fischer, appear in the same periodical (September

1920 and January 1921). Mutschmann has been more trenchantly

dealt with by Rudolf Metz (September 1920); and a discussion

between these two critics runs through Vol. 55, 1921. The com-

mon assumption of all these critics that English criticism is

governed by the Puritan tradition .is, in view of the work of

Landor, Garnett, Saintsbury, Raleigh, &c., absurd. The present

writer in the Hastings' Dictionary article concluded that 'Milton's

was not an anima naturaliter Christiana. His was rather the

soul of an ancient Stoic.' This seems to be Liljegren's view as he

restates it in Bemerkungen zur Biographie Milton's in Englische

Studien, September 1920. The question remains whether such

a temperament was not combined with Christian faith in Milton.

Liljegren thinks not. The present writer finds it hard to reconcile

this view with the fact that Milton made the Christian doctrine

of sin and redemption the subject of his three great poems.

An interesting article, and not irrelevant to this consideration,

is Mr. C. A. Moore's The Conclusion of Paradise Lost (Publ. of the

Mod. Lang. Ass. of America, xxxvi, March 1921). In reply to a

previous article by Mr. John Erskine, Mr. Moore contends that the

spirit of resignation, of sorrow balanced by hope, in which Paradise

Lost ends, is in harmony with the orthodox Christian tradition, which

saw in sin and death evils indeed, but evils which made possible

a higher good than human nature had otherwise attained, that

Milton here is in close harmony with Du Bartas and Giles Fletcher.

It is clear that the ground is being prepared on many sides for

a careful restudy of Milton. Other American articles of interest

are: Detached Similes in Milton Epics (Modern Lang. Notes,

xxxvi, p. 34) which stresses the large part played by nature as

against books in these; a note by Mr. Edward Chancey Baldwin on

the 'Golden compasses' of Book vii, 225 as due to a misunder-

standing of the A. V. of Prov. viii. 17 'He set a compass upon

the face of the deep', and on the 'Babylonian Woe' of the

Piedmont sonnet and the fifty-first chapter of Jeremiah; with other

notes in the same periodical: an article Further Interpretations

of Milton in which Mr. John A. Hines, continuing a former paper,

suggests some, on the face of them, not very convincing interpreta-

tions of passages in Milton. The Fair Infant of Milton's early

poem, he declares, following a statement of some old editions

recorded by Newton, was a boy, despite the reference to the

Boreas-Orithyia's story, and the closing lines :

Then thou the mother of so sweet a child

Her false imagin'd loss cease to lament.

It is the 'anima' which is the subject of the poem and accounts

for the feminine pronoun and allusions, while some of the last

106

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

are to males. Thus 'that sweet smiling youth' is, Mr. Hines says, Ganymede. Not more convincing is the view that the Nymphs of Lycidas 1. 50 are not the Muses but the Nereids 'whose presence is manifested in mists and clouds'. Why the king was 'specially loved of Nereids or mists is no more clear than why the Druids should be their 'Old Bards'. It is the other kind of clergy whose flocks are 'swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw'.

Samson Agonistes is the subject of a paper in the Publications of the Mod. Lang. Ass. of America, Sept. 1921, by Mr. Paull Franklin Baum, who controverts Johnson's well-known criticism and examines the tragedy in the light of Aristotle's definitions. As against Johnson, his main contention is that the play is not a beginning and end with no middle, no dramatic progress. The dramatic action is the awaking through successive impulses of Samson from the lethargy of despair to the perception of a service to be yet rendered to God. What the tragedy really wants is conflict. 'It moves along a straight line, sluggishly perhaps, but irresistibly—and yet too easily.' In closing Mr. Baum touches on the difficult question of the compatibility of Christian faith in providence with the tragic conception of life, and concludes that Samson Agonistes is not from Aristotle's point of view essentially tragic, which may be true, but is also true of more than one Greek tragedy which ends on a note not of disaster but rather of triumph, as Oedipus Coloneus.

Milton and the Art of War by Mr. James Holly Hanford (Studies in Philology, April, 1921) is a long appendix to Masson's Life of Milton. It is to prove, first, that Milton had a very thorough knowledge of classical and Renaissance text-books on war and tactics and of works belonging to his own age based on these: secondly, that this accomplishment was not pedantic or antiquated but was indeed the ordinary qualification of the military experts of the period: thirdly, that Milton's familiarity with these treatises was not at all exceptional, and that both this book-learning and Milton's views on the advantage of military discipline as expressed in his Tractate on Education, together with all the biographical facts known, do not prove that the poet was ever under arms. Mr. Hanford examines Phillips's statement that Milton was at one time about to be appointed adjutant-general in Waller's army, and

adduces evidence to show that such persons were only semi-civilian staff-officers. Some interesting passages from Milton's prose and poetry are quoted to illustrate how conversant he was with contemporary and classical strategy.

But the most interesting Milton publication of the year is Mr. John Smart's The Sonnets of Milton.3 This makes real additions to our knowledge in more ways than one. The Introduction is an important chapter in the history of the sonnet in Italy and England. Mr. Smart shows that the English form of sonnet ‘was brought into existence on an Italian basis by a selection and adjustment’; and that Milton's variety of the stricter Italian form with bold enjambement and overflow of the octave into the sestet was neither a rebellious breach of a tradition (as Mark Pattison thought) nor an attempt to assimilate the sonnet to the construction of an Horatian ode (as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has argued), but a recognized Italian variety, cultivated especially by Giovanni della Casa, whose sonnets were known to Milton.

Smart has also fixed the date of the Italian sonnets of Milton as prior to his visit to Italy, and identified the christian name, Emilia, of the lady addressed. Who she was is not yet clear. He has also corrected the mistake, handed on from one edition to another, of giving the name of the lady whose ‘religious memory’ is preserved in the fourteenth sonnet as Thomson, and shows that it is Thomason in the MS., and that she was the wife of George Thomason, the collector of Civil War pamphlets. He has gathered some detailed references to her character and tastes. He has shown with a scholarly thoroughness that the ‘Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son’ is Edward, the older son of the Lord President of the Council, not the younger Henry as Masson and others had conjectured. These are the most important, but not the only additions to our knowledge of Milton's friends and Milton's character, which Mr. Smart has brought together in this admirable volume. He accepts the order of the sonnets as that of composition. In Modern Philology, viii, p. 475, Jan. 1921, Mr. Hanford disputes this as regards sonnets 11 and 12, giving reasons to show that Milton himself reversed the order

3 The Sonnets of Milton, with Introduction and Notes. By John S. Smart, D.Litt. Glasgow : Maclehose, Jackson & Co., 1921. 195 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

108

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

of these two and shifted The Forcers of Conscience to the end

of the sonnets in the 1673 edition. One doubt admits another,

and Mr. Hanford discusses the order of the early, especially the

Italian, sonnets and comes to the conclusion which Mr. Smart has

also reached, the latter with fuller evidence. Though scrutinizing

the transcript of Milton's MS. closely, Mr. Hanford continues to

speak of Mrs. Thomson, so persistent is an error once started.

In the quest of sources American scholars are unwearied. Miss

O. H. Moore in Modern Philology, xix, Aug. 1921, traces the

influence of Mantuan and Marino upon the development of the

'Imperial Council' and the rôles of Sannazaro and Tasso in this

development. The pursuit of sources reminds one a little of the

Scilly Islanders who lived by taking in each other's washing.

No poet seems ever to say anything unless another has said it

before him, and it is hard to discover where the process began.

John Donne has not hitherto received much close attention

from German scholars. This deficiency is now made good by

a long essay on his life and poetry in Anglia (June, 1920) by

Philip Aronstein, whose excellent study of Ben Jonson, reprinted

from Anglia, is known to all scholars. Aronstein's essay is based

on Gosse's Life and Letters (1899) and the present writer's edition

of the Poems (1912), and makes no distinct addition to our

knowledge. He accepts the editor's connexion of Donne's

Metempsychosis with the execution of Essex, which was treated

with scant ceremony by critics in this country; and agrees with

him in stressing the conflict in Donne's mind between the old

and the new science, his consciousness of the shattering of the

traditional cosmology, in the Anniversaries. During the war

Aronstein made this the theme of a short essay in Englische

Studien on Donne and Bacon. He recognizes the resemblance,

in this acute sensibility to the movement of thought around him,

of Donne to Tennyson, and indeed adds: 'Tennyson hat oft

ähnliche Gedanken wie Donne. Ob er ihn gekannt hat?'

Aronstein's criticism is just and excellent, in its appreciation of the

various groups of poems, the analysis of his art, and the final

estimate of Donne's passionate, personal, metaphysical poetry:

'So ist D. ein Ich-künstler, aber nicht ein Ich-künstler, wie

etwa Byron, der sich einem schrankenlosen Subjektivismus

hingab, sich, wie Goethe von ihm sagt, im Sittlichen nicht

zu begrenzen wusste, immer dunkel über sich selbst war und

leidenschaftlich in den Tag hineinlebte, sondern wie Goethe

selbst, von einem starken inneren Triebe beherrscht, Klarheit

über sich selbst zu gewinnen, sein Ich fortzubauen und zu

entwickeln im Einklange mit seiner innersten Natur, und

zugleich sich äusserlich und innerlich einzufügen in die Welt,

im weitesten Sinne gefasst . . . Nicht der Dichter ist bei ihm

die Hauptsache, sondern das Leben.'

Several of the lesser seventeenth-century poets have been made

more accessible in the course of the year. A Neaste of Waspes 4

is an addition to the many collections of epigrams. Elizabethan

epigrams are too often dull and coarse, and these are of the

dullest and thoroughly deserve to be thus carefully reprinted in

their original abominable spelling and punctuation. Two of them

touch on the Somerset-Frances Howard scandal, none so poignant

as that which is found anonymous in many MSS., e.g. Sir Henry

Wotton's Burley MS. :

A page, a knight, a vicount, and an Earle,

In England matched to a scurvy girle.

This match was fitt for she was likewise fowre,

A wife, a witch, a murderer, and a w-e.

But the most important publication is the third volume of

Saintsbury's Caroline Poets,5 containing poems of Cleveland,

Henry King, Thomas Stanley, Thomas Flatman, and Nathaniel

Whiting. Professor Saintsbury's enthusiasm carries him

through them all, and his notes are a good finger-post to much

of interest which a casual reader might easily let slip. To the

reader interested in the historical point of view two qualities

of these poems will be apparent. The first is the subsidence of

the accent of the poet from that of song to that of a kind of

quiet conversation. King is a by no means undelightfully quiet

and friendly talker in verse, and the tone of Cowley's poems

(not of course represented here) is not much higher than that

of his prose essays. Even in the Pindariques he fails to catch

4 A Neaste of Waspes Latelie found out and discovered in the Low countries,

yealding as sweete honey as some of our English bees, At Dort . . 1615. Ed. by

C. H. Wilkinson. Oxford : Clarendon Press. 64 pp. 18s. net.

5 Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. iii, ed. by George Saintsbury.

Oxford: 1921. 551 pp. 16s. net.

110 THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

the 'long resounding march and energy divine' which Dryden was to communicate to English poetry. There is just a touch of it, however, in the Pindarics of Cowley's disciple Flatman, who is here made accessible. The second notable feature is the subsidence of the lyrical fervour of the greater 'metaphysicals' into a taste for mere neatness of conceit, and the influence, on these last representatives of the Renaissance tradition, of Marino and the Marinisti (made easier to study by the recent publication of Signor Croce's selections from Marino and from his followers). Stanley is the most obvious, the best example of a genuine English Marinist, but Sir Edward Sherburne is another. Hardly a poem of his is probably original. These more even than the more independent Waller are the Ned Softlies of the age. It is strange that Robert Herrick, whose poems in the late Professor Moorman's edition, with a bibliographical note by Mr. Percy Simpson, have been added to the Oxford Poets,6 has all and more than all the elegance of these poets without any of the deadness as of waxworks which lies on Stanley, Sherburne, and (comparatively) even Waller. The bubble and sparkle of Herrick's fancy are as obvious, wherever one opens this volume, as the finished and exquisite art. A greater spirit if a less equable poet, Andrew Marvell, is the subject of a pleasant appreciation by Mr. Cyril Falls in the Nineteenth Century, April, 1921.

Mr. H. F. B. Brett-Smith's edition of Drayton's Nymphidia7 is very charming, but it has no apparatus criticus and need hardly be noticed here.

In the Cornhill Magazine for September 1921, Mr. J. W. Brown (who had described fully in the same magazine in May of the preceding year two MS. song-books compiled by Thomas Smith, Fellow and Tutor of Queen's College, Oxford, and later Bishop of Carlisle) published a number of the poems which Dr. Fellowes, who had examined Smith's song-books, had been unable to assign to any known author. None of the pieces can compare with Bullen's discoveries, but it is well that attention

6 The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. by F. W. Moorman. Oxford : 1921. viii + 446 pp. 7s.

7 Nymphidia, by Michael Drayton. Oxford: Blackwell. 30 pp. 5s. net.

should be drawn to these collections, which it is Mr. Brown's

intention to deposit in the Bodleian.

An informative essay on a curious bye-way of literature,

Some Emblem Books and their Writers, by Mr. J. K. Floyer,

appears in the same number of the Cornhill. The subject is

indeed a by-way, but George Wither and Henry Peacham, to

whom Mr. Floyer devotes considerable space, are not altogether

negligible in the history of our literature.

The edition of The Poems of Richard Lovelace by the Caxton

Club of Chicago consists of two pleasant volumes with a short

introduction by Professor W. L. Phelps. It is not a critical edi-

tion, nor is the note of the editor intended to be more than a

prefatory biographical sketch.

In A Seventeenth Century Gallery of Poets (Journal of English

and Germanic Philology, xi), Mr. John J. Parry prints in a full

modernized version from MS. Ashmole 38 in the Bodleian the

poem which appeared in part as On the Time-Poets, in Choyce

Drollery, 1656. The MS. assigns it to William Heminge, son of

Shakespeare's editor and fellow theatrical manager.

In Mysticism in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Studies

in Philology, April 1921), Mr. Elbert N. S. Thompson has something

to say about Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, and Bunyan, as

mystics and critics of mysticism, but he devotes considerably more

space to the poets from Spenser and Southwell to John Norris of

Bemerton (d. 1711). The article is very long, and as it has no

obvious design, one is in danger of being lost : nor is it made any

more simple by the superfluity of quotations. The chronological

method of dealing with the individual poets, Spenser, Donne,

Vaughan, and the rest, is perhaps unavoidable. But after leading

us to believe that he has said all he means to say on them

separately, Mr. Thompson passes on to an explanation of their

favourite allegories and figures, illustrating with more quotations

from the same poets and incidentally introducing new phases of

mysticism. It is pointed out how towards the end of the sixteenth

century, and throughout the seventeenth, a very great proportion

of the verse produced was religious. Mr. Thompson believes that

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THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

this was not the manifestation of a literary fashion but rather the

result of a growing seriousness in the national temper and of the

ecclesiastical and political turmoil. Yet perhaps the strength of

a literary fashion in helping to determine the character of seven-

teenth century verse is implicitly admitted by the insistence on

the profound influence of Spenser on subsequent allegorical and

mystical poetry. The short passage on the definition of mysticism

and the varieties of mystical experience is excellent. It is un-

fortunate, however, that again the author reserved some of

what should have been said here to be scattered more or less at

random through the body of the article. There follows a sketchy,

but suggestive, account of the general mystical attitude of nearly

all the writers of the period. But Mr. Thompson curiously

imagines that Donne ‘of all the poets of the Jacobean age . . .

would be least suspected of a mystical turn of mind’, and then

proceeds to show, not very?convincingly by the evidence cited,

that he was really a mystic, a fact which surely no one ever doubted.

The Cambridge Platonists, also, though he eventually allows them

to be admitted, he thinks might more reasonably be regarded as

occupying a via media between the dogmatism of Calvinism and

the tendencies of Laud, and attempting to provide a rationalistic

basis for Christianity.

As a general rule, American scholars are rather averse to

subjects of some magnitude and scope, preferring those which

are strictly limited. But Mr. Jacob Zeitlin’s Commonplaces in

Elizabethan Life and Letters (Journal of English and Germanic

Philology, xix) is an attempt to cover a large field. It was

perhaps unnecessary to prove again that the Elizabethan and the

Jacobean periods were much given to sententious commonplaces,

and that Shakespeare did not intend us to laugh at Polonius’

instructions to Laertes. Mr. Zeitlin, however, makes his survey

literary and readable : he does not constantly insist upon the

labour which has gone to make it. He draws attention to the

interesting fact that the classics which were first translated and

which remained the most popular were not histories or other

matter-of-fact work, but books like Cicero’s Offices and Plutarch’s

Conjugal Precepts. It was from such gnomic-classics that

Elizabethan and Jacobean writers drew much of their material

for illustration and ornament. Indeed, so popular were these aphoristic works that commonplace-books and anthologies of sententious quotations were innumerable, and the same pro-verbal wisdom invaded even business and familiar letters. From the commonplace-book, Mr. Zeitlin thinks, it was but a step to the essay.

There is in Studies in Philology (April, 1921) an article by Mr. Morris W. Croll on Attic Prose in the Seventeenth Century which is even more comprehensive than the above-mentioned essay. It is not concerned primarily with the anti-Ciceronian movement in this country, nor, despite the title, with the reformation of style which in the last quarter of the sixteenth century gave a new direction to late Renaissance prose and determined its character throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, it is a very suggestive sketch of the struggle between Asianism and Atticism from Plato and the Sophists through Cicero, Tacitus, and Quintilian, to Erasmus, Pico, Lipsius, Bacon, Pascal, and Bossuet.

[By the Editors]

To the publications surveyed in this chapter there has to be added Professor Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century.8 Here arranged in three groups, Love Poems, Divine Poems, and Miscellanies, is a veritable 'golden treasury' of the choicest verse of the 'conceited' school from Donne, its leader, to Butler, whose Hudibras 'is a savage record of what the human spirit had suffered under the tyranny of metaphysical saints'. To all who have come under the peculiar spell of the metaphysical lyric, this selection, made with fastidious taste and set out with scrupulous exactness in textual detail, will be highly welcome. Professor Grierson has resisted the temptation to be eclectic, and has printed every poem included in the volume (except, of course, the Hudibras extract) in full. Whatever the inequalities may be to which the metaphysical poets are specially

8 Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by H. J. C. Grierson. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press, 1921. lviii +244 pp. 6s. net.

1922

H

114

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

liable, it is right that their lyrical utterances should be judged as

organic wholes.

No selection, however catholic, will satisfy in every item any

reader, or even (as Professor Grierson hints) the second thoughts

of the anthologist himself. Such a merely quaint piece of virtuosity

as Herbert's ‘ Easter wings ’ might have been snared to make room

for one of Cartwright's happier lyrics. And unless Phineas

Fletcher was ruled out as a Spenserian, rather than one of the

‘ metaphysicals ’, he might fairly have claimed representation.

But we are grateful for what we get, especially as the volume is

enriched by an Introduction remarkable for its insight and illuminat-

ing quality. The subtle and penetrating study of Donne is what

we should expect from the editor of his poems. But scarcely less

suggestive are the briefer comments on Carew, the poetic counter-

part of Vandyke ; on Marvell, ‘ apart from Milton . . . the most

interesting personality between Donne and Dryden, and at his very

best a finer poet than either ’; on Herbert ‘ whose central theme is

the psychology of his religious experiences ’; and on Crashaw with

his ‘ confectionery ’ conceits. And it is well to be reminded again of

the paradoxical fact, to which Coleridge drew attention, that for

all their extravagance of thought and imagery, the ‘ metaphysicals ’

are distinguished by ‘ the unconventional purity and naturalness of

their diction ’, and are masters of ‘ the neutral style ’.

As a supplement to the chapter on ‘ The Elizabethan Period :

Poetry and Prose ’ in the previous volume of The Year's Work,

a short notice is desirable of the two important articles on Dorothy

Osborne's Letters,9 by Professor Moore Smith, which appeared

near the end of the period surveyed in that volume. From an

examination of the MS. diary of Dorothy's brother Henry, in

which he has deciphered a number of passages in shorthand un-

touched by Judge Parry, and from other sources, including the

internal evidence of the Letters themselves, Dr. Moore Smith has

thrown ‘ a good deal of new light on Dorothy's self-told history ’.

Thus he gives fresh details of the negotiations for a marriage

between her and Sir J. Isham or Sir T. Osborne, and he identifies

the suitor who appeared after they were ‘ off ’ as Edmund Wylde,

9 New Light on Dorothy Osborne's Letters. By G. C. Moore Smith (Times

Literary Supplement, September 23 and October 28, 1920).

POETRY AND PROSE

115

a founder of the Royal Society. Another later suitor 'James B.', mentioned in Letter 62 as a 'chamber-fellow' of Sir William Temple, is shown to be James Beverley, a contemporary of Temple at Emmanuel College.

Besides contributing these and other new facts to Dorothy's story, Dr. Moore Smith suggests a revised order of Letters 1-60, and notes a number of errors in the 'Everyman's Library' text when collated with the MS. originals in the British Museum. He finally makes a plea for a new and more accurate edition.

H 2

IX

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1770

[By Montague Summers]

In a previous chapter reference has been made to those extracts in Mr. Thorn-Drury’s collection, A Little Ark, which belong to the earlier half of the seventeenth century.1 This garland also includes a number of pieces, now first printed from manuscripts or folio broadsides, that date from the Restoration period.

Not the least important of these is ‘An Elegy in Commemoration of Madam Ellenor Gwinn, Who Departed this Life on the 14th of November, Anno Dom. 1687’. It is reprinted ‘from a folio broadside, the upper part of which is ornamented by a particularly repulsive skull, cross-bones, winged hour-glass, pick-axes, and spades’. A facsimile of this macabre sheet forms the frontispiece of the book. This elegy has entirely escaped the general bibliographers, whilst even the specialists, Cunningham and his annotators, H. B. Wheatley, Lavers-Smith, and Gordon Goodwin, had no knowledge of it. The sentiments are becomingly eulogistic, and, as Mr. Thorn-Drury aptly remarks, ‘it is pleasant to have other contemporary testimony to the wit, good temper, and charity of Nell Gwyn’. It is curious to note that at one time considerable doubt existed as to the date of her death—Wewitzer unhesitatingly writes 14th March 1691—but this broadside confirms that given by Luttrell, which is now generally accepted.

The ‘Ode upon the Happy Return of King Charles II to his Languishing Nations, May 29, 1660. By James Shirley, Gent.’, a small quarto tract of four leaves, unknown to Gifford and to the indefatigable Dyce as to the more recent workers upon Shirley, Professor Nason and Dr. Forsythe, is, it must be confessed, surprisingly inferior for a poet of Shirley’s gentle genius. Such shambling and shoddy lines perchance deserve even the contempt with which Dryden, Oldham, Robert Gould, and others have so

1 See Chap. VII, pp. 88-9.

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1770

117

incomprehensibly alluded to the author of those admirable plays

The Cardinal and Hyde Park.

Of particular value to the dramatic historian are the verses 'On

that Worthy and Famous Actor, Mr. Charles Hart'; the leading

performer of the Theatre Royal company; since this broadside, of

which only one copy survives, is our sole source of information for

the date of Hart's death. In his note upon this elegy Mr. Thorn-

Drury takes occasion very definitely to query the statement that

Hart was a relative of Shakespeare. There is no contemporary

reference to this relationship, and there seems in fine to be no

foundation whatsoever for the assertion, which is so persistent,

however, that it has even been accepted by so careful a writer as

Robert W. Lowe. The elegies upon Walter Clun, who teste Pepys

excelled in Iago and Subtle, and upon Edward Angel, a low comedian

whose Christian name is hence now first known to us, afford useful

matter for writers on the Restoration theatre.

Of even more general interest are two items connected with

Mrs. Aphra Behn. It was known that Mrs. Behn had written an

epilogue for what was thought to have been a revival of Randolph's

Jealous Lovers, given at the Duke's House in 1682. This epilogue,

which was included in the Miscellany, 'Being a Collection of Poems

By several Hands', 1685, now proves to have been therein printed

from a very defective manuscript, and the small-folio leaf repro-

duced by Mr. Thorn-Drury shows us that the revival was an altera-

tion of the original comedy under the new title Like Father, like

Son : or, The Mistaken Brothers. Not only, moreover, have we

now the prologue, and the epilogue with eleven very pertinent

additional lines, but we are even able to date the performance

with some exactness. As Mr. Thorn-Drury shows in his scholarly

note, this must have taken place on a day between the 11th and

25th March 1682. The Elegy upon 'The Incomparable Astrea.

By a Young Lady of Quality' laments the decease of Mrs. Behn

in stanzas, intended to be Pindaric, but which for all their artificial

phrasing and conventional metaphor seem to be impressed with

a personal note and something very like real feeling and regret.

The comprehensive volume by Professor E. K. Broadus, The

Laureateship, A Study of The Office of Poet Laureate in England,

has already been dealt with in another and more general section of

118

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1770

the present work.2 But by reason of chapter VI, which has for its

theme Dryden, Shadwell, and Tate, this study has good claim to

receive some particular mention here also. And this must especially

be allowed to be the case when we find that the author emphatically

asserts that ‘The official laureateship properly begins with the

appointment of John Dryden’, and again ‘The history of the

actual laureateship, i. e. the office carrying with it the title of poet

laureate and a pension from the crown, and establishing its holder

as a functionary of the court, must indubitably begin with the

appointment of Dryden in the year 1668’. It should be noticed

that considerable misunderstanding has arisen from a confusion of

the date of Dryden’s appointment to the laureateship with the date

of his subsequent appointment to the post of historiographer royal.

Dr. Johnson correctly gives 1668 as the date of Dryden’s appoint-

ment, which he regarded as immediately following on the death of

Davenant. Malone, however, stated that Dryden ‘did not obtain

the laurel till August 18th, 1670’, and this he backed up by

printing an official document of that date appointing ‘the said

John Dryden our Poet Laureat and Historiographer Royal’.

Accordingly he postulates a hiatus of two years. Scott, Professor

Saintsbury, and Leslie Stephen (Dictionary of National Biography),

all accept Malone’s authority without question, whereas Sir A. W.

Ward reversed the mistake by giving 1668 as the date of Dryden’s

appointment to both offices. The fact is that, precisely six days

after Davenant’s death, there was issued 13th April 1668 a warrant

‘for a grant to John Dryden of the Office of Poet Laureate, void

by the death of Sir William Davenant’, whilst the patent of

18th August 1670 combines the office of historiographer royal

with the laureateship, conferring the former and confirming the

latt

By the very terms of his study Mr. Broadus can only afford space

to regard Dryden, Shadwell, and Tate from the point of view which

he has somewhat rigidly marked out for himself, and accordingly

his researches and criticism, however useful in many respects, must

necessarily be considered as supplementary material. There is a

very great deal that is difficult to disentangle in the earlier years

of Shadwell, and there remain many points which have never been

fully investigated, especially with reference to his relations with

2 See Chap. I, pp. 9-11.

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1770 119

the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. By the limitations of his theme Mr. Broadus has no occasion to touch upon these and other even more perplexing matters. He cannot, however, be completely absolved from having paid too little attention to MacFlecknoe. Even more open to exception is the assertion that when The Medal appeared in 1682, Shadwell replied with The Medal of John Bayes : A Satyr against Folly and Knavery, with a prefatory "Epistle to the Torjes". It is true that a number of superficial writers have in gregarious fashion attributed The Medal of John Bayes to Shadwell, but there is not a tittle of real evidence to burden him with the authorship of the foul rough rhymes in which Mr. Broadus may find ‘crude force’ if he will, but which he must not so unhesitatingly describe as ‘Shadwell’s assault’. Within the somewhat narrow bounds he has appointed we are given no unfair estimate of Shadwell and Nahum Tate. In the case of Shadwell, however, a detailed account of his comedies would not have been at all impertinent, for Langbaine, writing just a year after his appointment as Poet Laureate, describes him as ‘a Gentleman whose Dramatick Works are sufficiently known to the World; but especially his Excellent Comedies; which in the Judgement of some Persons, have very deservedly advanced him to the Honour he now enjoys, under the Title of Poet Laureate to their present Majesties’.

The very first paragraph with which commences the Avant-Propos introducing Dr. Charles Perromat’s detailed study of Wycherley 3 at once strikes the right note and prepossesses us in his favour. ‘Wycherley, de nos jours, est peu et mal connu. Les Précis de Littérature, en général, l’ignorent, et la plupart de ceux qui en parlent répètent, sans les contrôler, les appréciations de Macaulay ou de Taine. Or, jamais appréciations ne furent plus contestables. Macaulay, jugeant Wycherley avec cet esprit étroit et ces préjugés mesquins qui caractérisent le bon Puritain, n’a vu dans son œuvre que ce qu’il voulait y voir. On sait, d’autre part, comment Taine entendait la critique et, se basant sur les lois qu’il croyait immuables, s’ingéniait à faire rentrer tout auteur, que celui-ci s’y prêtait ou non, dans le cadre rigide qu’il avait d’avance préparé.’

3 William Wycherley. Sa Vie—Son Œuvre. Par Charles Perromat, Docteur ès lettres. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1921. 471 pp. 20 francs net.

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That is well said! Some exception may, it is true, be justly taken to the first sentence. For the neglect which so long obscured the genius and brilliance of Restoration dramatists, amongst whom there was none wittier, none more virile, than William Wycherley, is becoming, nay, has surely become, a reproach of the past, and what might have been true even a quarter of a century ago, happily no longer holds good. It might seem almost superfluous then for Dr. Perromat in the course of this excellent study so carefully and so repeatedly to have refuted Macaulay's verdict upon Wycherley. But in reality Dr. Perromat's able and convincing line of argument is by no means unncessitated. For owing to Macaulay's epigrammatic turn of style his sentences are apt to stick and be remembered. Their truth is not weighed by the general reader and the half-informed critic, who find these terse phrases dangerously easy to echo and enlarge. It is a pity that when the popular (but, it must be confessed, gravely inaccurate) reprint of Wycherley appeared some thirty years ago in the 'Mermaid' series it was prefaced by a lengthy excerpt from Macaulay's Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. Wycherley has never indeed been edited, and a scholarly reprint is a great desideratum. We believe, however, that this reproach may shortly be removed, as a critical recension of Wycherley is in active preparation.

Having devoted his first chapter to a long and detailed Life and Character of Wycherley, the author proceeds meticulously to examine the four comedies, concerning which he says with rare penetration : 'Les comédies de Wycherley, en effet, non seulement surpassent ce qui a été fait de meilleur de son temps, mais ont une valeur d'autant plus rare, qu'elles marquent un point de départ; tout un théâtre, celui des Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh et Sheridan, en est sorti.' Dr. Perromat, although arriving at the same conclusion by a somewhat different line of argument, agrees with Mr. W. C. Ward that the first performance of Love in a Wood took place in the spring of 1671. The new play was received with great favour by the town, a success which 's'explique et se justifie'. We are glad to note that Klette's empty charge of plagiarism from Sedley is contested, for Love in a Wood manifestly owes nothing to The Mulberry Garden, a far inferior piece.

The difficulties concerning the production of The Gentleman Dancing Master are amply discussed, but in this connexion it may

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be well to warn scholars that Downes is by no means to be relied

on implicitly. He was writing nearly forty years later, and 'it is

the old story of a senile memory with nothing to check its vagaries

. . . the events related mostly took place, but seldom in the sequence

indicated.' Dr. Perromat perhaps has not sufficiently realized the

difficulties and pitfalls of Roscius Anglicanus. But he has done

some excellent work in proving by copious extracts from El Maestro

de Danza that Wycherley is by no means so indebted to Calderon

as facile historians and superficial critics have ignorantly believed.

The full and candid appreciation of The Country Wife rises to

heights of real eloquence.

'Jamais Wycherley n'avait montré autant de verve entraînante,

autant de fantaisie, autant d'esprit, autant de gaieté, autant

d'observation malicieuse. A ces dons, innés chez lui, s'ajoutent

les qualités qu'il a acquises peu à peu par l'exercice de sa pro-

fession si l'on peut dire : un incomparable tour de main, la science

de préparer et de graduer les effets, l'adresse de ménager les

coups de théâtre. . . . Mais The Country Wife vaut mieux encore

par le fond que par la forme. Wycherley a relevé sa comédie

par une psychologie très fine et une observation très exacte et

très profonde. . . . Le dialogue pétille et scintille, flamboyé, crépite,

se ranime, rebondit. Les mots y foisonnent et s'y bousculent.

L'auteur a jeté à poignée les richesses de son esprit, et a voulu

nous éblouir par les beautés d'une langue savoureuse et rare. . . .

The Country Wife est la plus brillante des comédies de Wycherley.

Elle est moins profonde que The Plain Dealer . . . mais elle est

plus égale. . . . C'est assurément l'oeuvre d'un grand auteur

comique.

Even Garrick's mischievous blundering ('Quel procédé offensant !')

could not wholly devitalize this masterpiece of comic genius,

and the anaemic The Country Girl has surprised and delighted

audiences of to-day with its freshness and verve. As Moore once

said : 'The very rinsings of Wycherley's play have a raciness in

them that is indestructible.' It may be worth noting also a fact

which Dr. Perromat has neglected to observe, but which lends no

little weight to his championship. The main theme of The Country

Wife, to which exception has been taken, is the subject of the most

popular of all the comedies of Terence, who derived it 'bene

vertendo' from Menander. Yet neither Terence nor Menander

has been censured and reproved.

Although The Plain Dealer is generally considered Wycherley's

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finest play—and without question it contains some of his boldest strokes and keenest observation—yet we are inclined to agree with Dr. Perromat that there are certain awkwardnesses and a certain want of nice balance in the construction of the scenes which must be counted as defects.

This is not to say that it is not a drama of the very first rank, and one may cordially echo the verdict of Voltaire, who said: ‘Je ne connais point de comédie chez les anciens, ni chez les modernes, où il y ait autant d’esprit.’

Not the least valuable pages of Dr. Perromat’s study are those he has devoted to the Miscellany Poems and Posthumous Works.

Although in the general opinion these add little, if anything, to Wycherley’s reputation, some of the more epigrammatic poems and saws still reflect the satire of The Plain Dealer, and the letters are more easy and natural than the fashionable epistolography of the day.

We may notice that Dr. Perromat denies Wycherley’s authorship of that rare poem Hero and Leander in Burlesque, which, published anonymously in 1669, has sometimes been attributed to him.

Students will do well to pay particular attention to the chapters on Wycherley’s Influence and Originality, where they will find much that is of sterling value.

In the course of this study we have met with a few details that require revision, but these are of secondary importance.

The Libertine, for example, should be dated 1675 and not 1676.

Notwithstanding the clever argument (p. 184) it is more than probable that Wycherley knew L’École des Filles, as, in spite of the wholesale destruction of the first edition in 1655, it was clandestinely reprinted in 1667-8, a fact of which Dr. Perromat does not seem aware.

The book was widely diffused in England.

It was bought by Pepys, 8th February 1668, and there are allusions to it in Leanerd’s The Rambling Justice (Theatre Royal, January 1678), in Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds (Duke’s Theatre, 1681), and elsewhere.

We trust it will not seem ungracious to draw attention to the one blemish in so brilliant, exhaustive, and scholarly a work—the bibliography.

Here we have first quartos of Wycherley, the Duke of Newcastle, D’Urfey, Ravenscroft, Flecknoe, Southerne, and other original editions duly listed, but side by side with these, and without a word of warning, appear worthless and incomplete reprints.

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123

It was perhaps inevitable that Professor Eccles, in his lecture Racine in England,4 should have dealt with The Distrest Mother in considerable detail, but for scholars it is rather wearisome work to tread once more such well-known ground. He is mistaken, however, in supposing that after its first run in 1711 this drama was ‘withdrawn . . . to be revived only in 1735’. Barton Booth, who died 10th May 1733, frequently appeared in his favourite rôle Pyrrhus, and stage historians have amply described the majesty of demeanour he assumed in this part, his acting of which largely contributed to the enduring popularity of the play. Again, the Andromache, published under Crowne’s auspices, was acted in the winter of 1674 (not in 1675), and Otway’s Titus and Berenice was produced in 1676, not in 1677 (p. 4). There are other slight errors to be met with, and some omissions must be noticed. Crowne’s heroic tragedy, The Destruction of Jerusalem, with its long love scenes between Titus and Berenice, acted at Drury Lane in the spring of 1677, and Lee’s Mithridates, King of Pontus, produced at the same theatre in the spring of the following year, should both have been mentioned. A word or two would have been well given to Ozell, who published his translations Britannicus and The Litigants in 1714 and 1715, and although scholars are agreed that Wycherley’s Widow Blackacre owes nothing to Les Plaideurs, the charge of plagiarism has been so often brought that in a lecture upon Racine a refutation were not amiss. The reasons for the English attitude towards Racine, the general lack of genuine appreciation, are rather suggested than discussed, and the exposition, such as it is, seems to go along the obvious lines.

Under the title Restoration Comedies5 the present writer collected three plays—Thomas Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding, Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds, and Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice—none of which had before been edited. These plays, which have hitherto been practically unobtainable, were furnished with an ample introduction and fully annotated, the text in each case being carefully

4 The Taylorian Lecture, 1921, Racine in England, by F. Y. Eccles, M.A., Professor of French Literature in the University of London. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. 30 pp. 2s. net.

5 Restoration Comedies. The Parson’s Wedding, The London Cuckolds, and Sir Courtly Nice, or; It Cannot Be. With an Introduction and Notes by Montague Summers, Jonathan Cape, 1921. xlvi +400 pp. 15s. net.

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given from the earliest copies, the folio Killigrew, 1663 (with

general title 1664); the Ravenscroft quarto, 1682; and the Crowne

quarto 1685. The original spelling and stage directions are

meticulously retained throughout. The Parson's Wedding, which

is referred to more than once by Pepys, was generally considered

the best work of Thomas Killigrew, 'a merry droll', the first lessee

and manager of Drury Lane, and a famous figure in Restoration

London. The London Cuckolds and Sir Courtly Nice both kept the

stage until the latter half of the eighteenth century, a fact which

of itself sufficiently proves their dramatic value.

It is good to know that Mr. Gaselee's erudite and valuable paper 6

upon the Spanish books bought by Samuel Pepys is to be reissued

with a catalogue made by the same scholar of the important Spanish

collections in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Amongst these are many curious and interesting items, which include

no less than seventy-one ballads, printed at Seville about 1680 with

Lope Falcon's three pasquils, Curioso Tratado de las Ordenanzas

del Tabaco, twenty-six comedias upon moral and religious subjects,

and two bulls, published in 1684, of the saintly Innocent XI.

There is no doubt that Pepys was well acquainted with Spanish,

and even the most casual reader of the Diary must have remarked

his frequent use of Spanish tags and words; para, con, toker (tocar),

moher (mujer), camera (camara), and many more continually occur.

In England Spanish literature was widely read and enjoyed.

Lord Bristol, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Tuke, Roger L'Estrange,

Thomas St. Serf, translated from Calderon, Antonio de Mendoza,

Quevedo, Agustin Moreto, whilst our dramatists, Dryden, Wycher-

ley, Crowne, Orrery, Mrs. Behn, owe much in the conduct of their

plots to the Spanish theatre. It may be remembered that through-

out her life Anne of Austria kept a Spanish court, with Spanish

actors and authors.

In his essay John Crowne and America 7 Mr. Arthur Franklin

White has with no little care brought together and set in order

6 Samuel Pepys' Spanish Books, by Stephen Gaselee. The Library. Fourth

Series, ii, no. 1, pp. 1-11, 1921.

7 John Crowne and America. Arthur Franklin White. Publications of the

Modern Language Association of America, xxxv, pp. 447–63.

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125

a number of interesting facts, which, if known to a few scholars,

had not as yet been thus serviceably correlated. Quite an excep-

tional number of inaccuracies have been perpetuated concerning

the parentage and early life of John Crowne, and from Mr. White's

article we are able to correct errors in the accounts of him in

various popular works.

John Crowne was for three years a resident of New England and

a student at Harvard College. At the end of December 1660

he returned to England with his father, Colonel William Crowne,

who was not, as has often been alleged, a preacher, but who served

as Rouge Dragon at the coronation of Charles II, 23rd April 1661.

John Crowne died 27th April 1712. In the short account which

he gives of Crowne's work, Mr. White shows, it must be confessed,

little appreciation of his subject. As a dramatist Crowne, although

now unduly neglected, had great merit, and that capital fop-comedy,

Sir Courtly Nice, which has been recently edited by the present

writer,8 held the stage until the end of the eighteenth century.

It should be pointed out that any reference to Crowne's plays must

be to the original quartos. The four incomplete volumes of

Crowne in Maidment and Logan's Dramatists of the Restoration

(1874) represent the nadir of that unfortunate series. The text is

presented in slipshod and haphazard fashion, and not infrequently

-as in the instances of The Country Wit (1675) given from the

quarto of 1693, and City Politics (1683) given from the quarto of

1688—it is derived from a late and inferior edition. Mr. White

has, it would seem, made use of this poor reprint, which henceforth

must be entirely discarded.

Although The Careless Husband was first produced at Drury

Lane, 7th December 1704, nevertheless this brilliant comedy of

intrigue so clearly maintains with an added flavour of delicacy the

tradition of Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and the rest, that it is

entirely proper that a chapter dealing with the Restoration period

should include some notice of Mr. Harry Gllicksman's Stage

History of Colley Cibber's 'The Careless Husband'.9 Unfortunately

8 See above, pp. 123-4.

9 The Stage History of Colley Cibber's 'The Careless Husband', by Harry

Glicksman. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,

xxxvi, pp. 244–50, 1921.

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this proves to be nothing more than an indifferently executed, and indeed imperfect, extract from Genest's encyclopaedic volumes.

One point certainly calls for attention. The Careless Husband was performed at Covent Garden, 9th February 1745, and Genest transcribing, as is his wont, the bill for that day, has 'Not acted 5 years'. Mr. Glicksman, taking these to be Genest's own words, promptly accuses our chronicler of a gross error, inasmuch as The Careless Husband was played in 1742, for which date Davenport Adams' Dictionary of the Drama is cited as the authority. Mr. Glicksman does not seem aware that Davenport Adams merely copies this particular from Genest, in whose pages is recorded a special revival of The Careless Husband, 20th March 1742, 'for the benefit of Cibber Junior' (who appeared as Lord Foppington to the Lady Betty Modish of Peg Woffington), but at Drury Lane.

The 'Not acted 5 years' of the Covent Garden Bill refers only to that particular house, and not to any other theatre. Indeed, The Careless Husband was played at Drury Lane, 11th May 1744.

Mr. Glicksman temerariously names 28th November 1792 as the date of the last performance of this comedy. But it was still being acted in the third decade of the nineteenth century, and Harry Johnston, 'the biggest boy in the world,' was celebrated as Sir Charles Easy. In those days the character was dressed as a Regency buck with high stock, open waistcoat, silk stockings, and light pumps. Cumberland, it may be noted, includes The Careless Husband in his collection of plays then popular on the boards, fourteen volumes, 1817.

So many influences were for so many years at work upon the fashioning of the Heroic Play that it would be difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to sum up the origins of this complex form of drama in a few pages. It is none the less true that some particular factor or modification may be briefly and usefully studied in a detached essay if there are new data to discuss or obscurer examples to present, but, although no doubt exceedingly well-intentioned in the writing, Mr. Mervyn L. Poston's article10 on the Origin of the Heroic Play cannot be said to offer anything fresh for our consideration.

10 The Origin of the Heroic Play, by Mervyn L. Poston. Modern Language Review, January 1921. pp. 18-22.

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127

There are, moreover, inaccuracies in detail, and we may not impertinently remark that the 'Heroic Temper' had its seeds further back than Goffe or Cartwright or Lodewick Carlell.

To cite only one obvious reference, Dryden himself in 'Of Heroic Plays, An Essay', prefixed to The Conquest of Granada I (4to, 1672), names amongst other authors Ariosto and Tasso; nay more, he expressly asserts that 'the first Image' he had of Almanzor 'was from the Achilles of Homer'.

Such a genealogy is open to comment but it cannot be disregarded.

In the same essay also Dryden plainly recognizes Davenant as a pioneer in the heroic drama, and he seems to regard The Siege of Rhodes as the first English heroic play of Restoration type, although it is by no means entirely developed in 'fulness of plot and the variety of character'.

In the face of this opinion Mr. Poston's efforts to depreciate the importance of The Siege of Rhodes are inconclusive.

X

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[By Edith J. Morley]

No work of outstanding importance dealing with this period has been published during the last year. From a purely literary standpoint, perhaps the most interesting text that has appeared is Mr. Martin Freeman's edition of the Correspondence of Vanessa and Jonathan Swift.1 The original letters were 'put to the press' soon after Vanessa's death in 1726, but this premature publication was very properly stopped by the intervention of Dr. Sheridan. From that time, until they were bought by the British Museum in 1919, 'the Swift and Vanessa letters have never even been printed consecutively, except in the edition of Swift's complete works by Sir Walter Scott'. Most of them have, however, been accessible either in that or in Dr. Elrington Ball's edition of Swift's correspondence, but Mr. Freeman is able to make some notable additions to the series. Of these, the most illuminating is Swift's letter to Miss Anne Long which was enclosed in one to Esther Van Homrigh, and was intended for her perusal as well as that of her cousin. This letter may be looked upon as giving the key to Swift's attitude to Vanessa at all events in the earlier stages of their intercourse. It is possible to interpret this less favourably to Swift than does Mr. Freeman, but clearly there is ground for his opinion that Vanessa's attentions to her friend were more particular and noticeable than was relished by the recipient. 'I have a mighty friendship for her. . . . Her greatest favourites at present are Lady Ashburnham, her dog and myself. She makes me of so little consequence that it almost distracts me. She will bid her sister go downstairs before my face, for she has "some

1 Vanessa and her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift, the Letters edited for the first time from the originals, with an Introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Selwyn & Blount, 1921. 216 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

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129

private business with the Doctor”. In short, there would never be

an end of telling you the hardships she puts on me, only because

I have lived a dozen or fifteen years too much.'

The other hitherto unpublished letter (No. XXXII) is pathetic

in Vanessa's vain attempts to be cheerful and to obey Swift's com-

mands. ‘I have done all that lay in my power to follow your

example, for fear of teasing you, but find I cannot defer writing to

you any longer.' The erasures in the original are even more

significant, e. g. : ‘I was so very ill that I thought I should have

died, which if I had it would have maid both you and I eassy’

[words in italics erased.]

The remaining new Swift-Vanessa matter consists of a note from

Swift [XLII], and a postscript [XVII] ; there are also nine hitherto

unpublished letters which are not connected with this correspon-

dence and are from another manuscript volume ; and one from the

Vanessa MS. volume, also unconnected with its main contents.

Further, Mr. Freeman includes in his volume some Miscellanea

bearing on his main theme, the most important of which is the

poem Cadenus and Vanessa.

His editing is most careful, and he claims that his text is accurate

but for changes of obsolete spellings (and of Vanessa's misspellings)

and punctuation. To satisfy the curiosity of those who like to see

‘unedited specimens’ of her style, there is, in addition to the facsimile

of No. XXXII, from which we have already quoted, an exact

transcript of XXIX ; both these justify Swift's complaints of

feminine illiteracy.

The Introduction gives a dispassionate, balanced account of the

relationship between Swift and Vanessa, which disposes of the

more sensational legends that have grown up concerning it.

Whether Mr. Freeman's exoneration of Swift will be accepted by

the reader in its entirety is largely a matter of temperament and,

perhaps, of prejudice. But since the story has to be told, and since

no one can doubt the suffering of Swift as well as of Vanessa, it is

pleasant to find an editor who endeavours to be just to both and

who, if he extenuates nothing, yet sets down nought in malice.

No student of Swift can afford to neglect the volume. It is, there-

fore, a pity that the binding is so unsatisfactory that it becomes

loose in a single reading. This is the more to be regretted that

paper and print are both good. There is a slip in grammar in the

1922

I

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note on p. 77 (‘afraid to stay at the same house as her’) which

needs correction in any future edition.

In the first issue of The Year’s Work we noticed Martin Seeker’s

2s. 6d. reprint of The Beggar’s Opera with its attractive coloured

cover by Lovat Fraser. This year comes William Heinemann’s

édition-de-luxe,2 with eight full-page plates, and numerous head- and

tail-pieces by the same artist. The joy in handling and looking at

this delightful volume is tempered only by the inevitable sorrow

that is felt when we remember that Lovat Fraser is dead. None

of his work is more full of humour, artistic force, and beauty of

design than the illustrations to this volume, and it is lamentable

that his achievement is complete, and that the life of one so rich in

promise of yet greater things is at an end. Even Mr. Drinkwater’s

preface, with its finely-worded and finely-felt appreciation of the

man and the artist, cannot reconcile us to the loss of one of whom

it can truly be said that ‘beauty of spirit flowed in everything he

did into beauty of execution.’

He had a heart to praise, an eye to see,

And beauty was his king.

Fraser’s own note on his difficulties in staging The Beggar’s

Opera tells us something of his artistic sincerity and artistic con-

science. To destroy the labour of months and ‘to start feverishly

afresh’ three weeks before ‘the actual work was due to be carried

out at the costumier’s and in the painting shops’ would not have

been possible to any one with a less high conception of his purpose ;

it is pleasant, therefore, to remember that the audiences at Hammer-

smith have proved by their appreciation that they were worthy of

the artist who wrestled with his difficulties to produce the scene

and design the dresses that have delighted them. In this volume

the scene and characters live again and crystallize the joys of the

Hammersmith revival. Paper and print and cover are worthy

alike of the illustrations and of Mr. Gay’s text, and every one con-

cerned may be congratulated on an admirable result.

Professor Hecht has made an elaborate and detailed investiga-

tion into the work of Daniel Webb, a nearly-forgotten critic of the

2 The Beggar’s Opera, written by Mr. Gay. Scenes and costumes by

C. Lovat Fraser. William Heinemann, 1921. xiii + 93 pp. 15s. net.

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131

eighteenth century whose work is very little known and not easy

to obtain. He also reprints the Bemarks on the Beauties of Poetry

-a contribution of some importance to the beginnings of aesthetics

at that period.3 It appeared in 1762, the same year as Hurd's

Letters on Chivalry and Romance, and six years later than Burke's

Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. Webb's chief interest for us

is that he was among the earliest to cast doubts on the beauty of the

regular heroic couplet, and to contrast Pope's versification dis-

advantageously with that of Milton. But historically he has also

his importance as being one of the first Englishmen to attempt an

investigation into the beauties of the fine arts, and to seek to estab-

lish the relationship between them. Professor Hecht shows Webb's

dependence on the ancients, and that his knowledge of-at any rate

his references to-English writers and the moderns generally are

comparatively few. He borrows freely from foreign critics,

notably from Anton Mengs and from Winckelmann, but he learns

from them to appreciate the worth of the fine arts, and he makes

his own that which he appropriates. Moro important still, he

makes it current knowledge among his countrymen.

The reprint of the Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry will be of

real service to students of critical thought. It is essential for them

to be able to obtain first-hand knowledge of small as well as of

great writers if they are to trace the developments of literary taste.

Webb's essay is significant of more than one tendency in the second

half of the eighteenth century, and Professor Hecht is to be con-

gratulated on his sane and balanced account of the man and his

work.

Dr. Danielowski's examination 4 of the journals and diaries of

the early Quakers is an amplification of her study of Richardson's

first novel-a dissertation published in 1917. She sets out to

prove that the time was ripe for the appearance of such a novel as

Pamela, and that many of the elements of the sentimental novel of

3 Daniel Webb, ein Beitrag zur englischen Ästhetik des achtzehnten Jahr-

hunderts, mit einem Abdruck der Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry [1762]

und einem Titelkupfer von Hans Hecht. Henri Grand, Hamburg-Altrahl-

stedt, 1920. 117 pp. M. 10.

4 Die Journale der frühen Quäker; 2ter Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen

Romans in England von Dr. Emma Danielowski. Berlin : Mayer & Müller,

1921. x + 138 pp.

I 2

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manners and character are to be found in the autobiographies of the

Quakers as well as in the essayists where they have been more

generally recognized. Dr. Danielowski examines in detail and

with many quotations the journals of some leading Quakers, includ-

ing those of Thomas Ellwood and of Penn ; she shows that in

arrangement, form, and style these have much in common with

Richardson's first attempt, and that even his letter-method is not

original. (See e.g. Banks's letter to his daughter Sarah, when in

service, pp. 37/8). The author does not claim that Richardson was

directly influenced by these predecessors, but that his sentimental

treatment of reality was no new thing ; that the mixture of 'narra-

tive and reflection', the sermonising, the psychological analysis are

all to be found long before his day in writings which claimed to

relate fact, not fiction. 'Die Journale der fruhen Quäker bilden

weder eine Vorstufe der Pamelageschichte, noch haben sie Richard-

son stofflich als Vorlage gedient.' But Richardson utilized ten-

dencies which were prevalent at the time, and those tendencies

may be studied in the Quaker journals and diaries.

Dr. Danielowski labours her points rather heavily, but they are

worth making, and they have not previously been illustrated by so

detailed an investigation of sources.

Lindsey's 'letters 5 are of value only as an index to the character,

interests and pursuits of the writer, and as throwing light upon the

various religious and political controversies of the age in which

he lived.' This verdict of Dr. McLachlan, his editor, needs no

comment or addition. Lindsey's interest for us is not literary, but

he helps us to reconstruct the social background of his age, and

from this point of view Dr. McLachlan's careful exposition of his

life and times and copious extracts from the letters are of impor-

tance to students of the eighteenth century, and more particularly

of Unitarian theology.

Dr. Göricke's study of social ideals 6 in The Tatler, The Spectator,

and The Guardian is preceded by a careful analysis of the perfect

5 Letters of Theophilus Lindsey, by H. McLachlan, M.A., D.D., Manchester

University Press. Longmans, Green & Co., 1920. xii + 148 pp. 6s. net.

6 Das Bildungsideal bei Addison und Steele, by Walter Göricke. Bonner

Studien zur englischen Philologie. Peter Hanstein, 1921. 55 pp. M. 3.

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133

courtier as conceived by Castiglione, and of his influence in Eliza-

bethan and later England. The writer traces the gradual develop-

ment of middle-class ideas of the meaning of the word ‘gentleman’,

and proceeds from these to the modifications found in Addison

and Steele. The study is, doubtless, of peculiar value to foreigners,

but is by no means devoid of interest to ourselves. While the

essayists recognize the importance of good birth, they emphasize,

nevertheless, the at least equally cogent need for good-breeding

and virtue ;—‘The appellation of a gentleman is never to be

affixed to a man’s circumstances, but to his behaviour in them ’

(Tatler, 207). The attitude revealed towards learning is curiously

indicative of eighteenth-century rationalism. By learning ‘I mean

all useful knowledge, whether speculative or practical ’ (Guardian,

111), and the numerous quotations Dr. Göricke brings together

illustrate the point of view. Thus : ‘It is observed too often that

men of wit do so much employ their thoughts upon fine speculations,

that things useful to mankind are wholly neglected ’ (Tatler, 18),

and, as a sequence, ‘it is not justifiable to spend so much time in

that which so very few are judges of’ (Guardian, 94). The gentle-

man’s education is to include ‘the whole course of the polite arts

and sciences ’, but always with a view to practical results. Nor is

it without bearing on the attitude of the time that : ‘The height of

good-breeding is shown rather in never giving offence than in doing

obliging things’ (Tatler, 21), or that, ‘The lettered coxcombs

without good-breeding give more just occasion to raillery, than the

unlettered coxcombs with it’ (Guardian, 94).

These are only some of the aspects of the subject revealed by the

series of quotations and references collected under various headings.

The last section is a brief attempt to apply the results to modern

English society. Dr. Göricke finds that the eighteenth-century

spirit of compromise persists ; that the ‘gegenseitige Durchdrin-

gung der adligen und der bürgerlichen Geistessphären, um eine

höchst verwickelte Wechselwirkung, die seit den Tagen Addisons

und Steeles, wo sie zum ersten Mal deutlich in die Erscheinung

tritt, weiter fortgewirkt, und zu einer Einheitlichkeit der englischen

Gesellschaft geführt hat, die imponierend und ohne Beispiel ist’.

As a result there is, he holds, a strong tendency to uniformity in

English life, combined with lǒss of individuality, and consequent

social monotony.

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THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In an article in Modern Philology,7 W. S. Hendrix points out

'certain parallels in thought, but rarely in words, between the

Tatler' and Quevedo, Guevara, and Le Sage. He quotes correspond-

ing passages, and seems to establish Steele's familiarity with the

Spanish and French authors mentioned in his title.

Sir James Frazer reprints in his Sir Roger de Coverley8 volume,

five supplementary pseudo Spectator Club Essays, which originally

appeared as an introduction to a selection of Addison's essays,

and as contributions to The Saturday Review. The other paper in

the volume dealing with an eighteenth-century subject is a bio-

graphical account of Cowper, first prefixed to a selection of his

letters. Sir James is apparently an enthusiastic admirer of Cowper,

'one of the most charming of English poets', whose Task is 'one

of the most delightful works in the English language'. It is

always pleasant to read an appreciation by a writer of balanced

and thoughtful mind, but neither here nor in the Sir Roger essays

does Sir James contribute anything fresh to our knowledge of the

subjects he has chosen.

In the Journal of English and Germanic Philology,9 Mr. F. B.

Kaye writes a detailed account of the certain, doubtful, and spurious

writings of Bernard Mandeville, arguing 'the question of attribu-

tion to Mandeville wherever this is necessary'. He also analyses

the contents of each genuine work in such a way as to throw light

on the development of the author's thought and its relation to the

Fable of the Bees. Mr. Kaye claims to have 'found evidence of

an influence so far-reaching and fundamental' that he believes he

is not 'exaggerating in describing Mandeville as one of the most

important writers of the century, whose influence is to be compared

with that of Hume and Adam Smith'. But the substantiation of

this belief in Mandeville's importance 'in the spheres of ethics and

7 Quevedo, Guevara, Le Sage, and The Tatler, by W. S. Hendrix, Modern

Philology, xix, no. 2, November 1921, pp. 177-136.

8 Sir Roger de Coverley and Other Literary Pieces, by Sir James George

Frazer. Macmillan & Co., 1920. xii+319 pp. 8s. 6d. net.

9 The Writings of Bernard Mandeville: A Bibliographical Survey, by F. B.

Kaye. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, xx, no. 4,

October 1921. pp. 419-67. University of Illinois. $1 a single number,

$3 a volume.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

economics' is reserved for a forthcoming edition of his Fable of

the Bees (Clarendon Press). The scope of the present article is

confined to a scholarly survey of the other writings of Mandeville,

which have hitherto been almost entirely neglected, except in the

German edition by Paul Sakmann (1897), which is not, in Mr. Kaye's

opinion, altogether satisfactory.

The Life and Letters of John Gay,10 by Mr. Melville, except in

so far as it makes available Gay's letters which alone render it

worth notice here, is a disappointing volume. It shows no critical

acumen and adds little or nothing to Underhill's Introductory

Memoir to the 'Muses' Library' edition of Gay's poems.

Mr. Melville is right when he says that Gay was a 'considerable

figure in the literary and social circles of his day'. But he does

little to make us realize Gay's indubitable attraction for his con-

temporaries. Why did Pope love him or Swift care for him 'more

than for any man'; how was it that the Duchess of Queensberry

thought it worth while to incur banishment from court for his sake?

Mr. Melville lets us vainly pause for a reply, and while we willingly

admit the difficulty of reviving Gay's personal charm, we yet think

a biographer fails if he succeed in giving no hint of it.

Similarly we must question the judgement of a critic who says

(p. 81) that 'As a literary work The Beggar's Opera has no great

claims but there is a spontaneous humour about it that has charm'.

Nor, to take only one other instance, is there any attempt to

examine the value of the Fables or, except for one unfortunate

sentence on p. 150, of The Shepherd's Week or of Trivia.

Finally, in addition to much slipshod writing, we note several

misprints, of which one of the most serious is the twice-repeated

'Underwood' for 'Underhill' (pp. ix, x).

Dr. R. Foster Jones has completed a piece of work which has

long awaited a careful investigator. He has examined11 Theobald's

contribution to eighteenth-century criticism, and established the

position that ought to be taken by his edition of Shakespeare. This

10 Life and Letters of John Gay, by Lewis Melville. Daniel O'Connor, 1921.

xii + 167 pp. 8s. 6d. net.

11 Lewis Theobald, his Contribution to English Scholarship, with some

Unpublished Letters, by Richard Foster Jones, Ph.D. Columbia University

Press, and London, Humphrey Milford, 1919. xi + 363 pp. $2.00.

136

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has too often been judged according to Pope's spiteful estimate, and

without due recognition of its merit. What Dr. Jones, in a learned

and useful chapter on the subject, rightly calls 'the rage foremend-

ing' indubitably affected Shakespeare Restored, 1726, and some of

Theobald's ludicrous alterations of the text in that early work are

too absurd to be easily forgotten. But this is not the whole story.

The man who substituted scotch'd for scorch'd in the line: 'We

have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it'; cannot fairly be judged only

by his failures even if we confine ourselves to a survey of his textual

emendations. However, Theobald contributed more than these to

Shakespearian study, and later on he produced the first scholarly

edition of the plays. In this he showed genuine respect for the

authority of his text, and poetic feeling in his criticisms and altera-

tions : he had also the 'spirit of scholarship that refuses to accept

anything that cannot be buttressed with proofs and reasons'. He

realized the necessity for thoroughness, more particularly in the

presentation of 'the best text possible illuminated with all necessary

explanations. By emendation he meant not only correcting by

conjecture, but also the restoring, by collation, of a better variant

reading'. Further, by the time when he edited Shakespeare in

1734, he had explored widely in earlier English literature : in his

preface he claims to have read over 800 old plays, and 'though this

statement is a palpable exaggeration . . . yet there was some basis

for it'. He knew a good many authors other than dramatists, and

by his reading he discovered many of Shakespeare's sources. His

notes 'are a mine of miscellaneous information, clearing up fully

and once for all what might have remained undetected for genera-

tions' (J. Churton Collins). Like Bentley, whose methods he

closely followed, Theobald, by investigation and comparison which

confirmed his conjectures, proved each step that led him to reach

a conclusion. Without such confirmation plausible theories were

ruthlessly rejected. Dr. Jones points out, for example, how Theo-

bald searched in vain for a copy of Lodge's Rosalyndé, because he was

persuaded that if succesful he would 'find many of our Author's

Canzonets on this Subject to be scraps of the Doctor's amorous

Muse'. It was left for Johnson to discover the nature and scope

of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Lodge in As You Like It, but the

way was thus clearly pointed out to him by Theobald. Dr. Jones

calls attention incidentally to Dr. Nichol Smith's Eighteenth

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

137

Century Essays on Shakespeare, the introduction to which contains some erroneous statements due to imperfect acquaintance with Theobald's edition and preface.

It must not be supposed that Dr. Jones passes lightly over the faults of Theobald's work, but these are more familiar than its merits and need not be detailed here. What is for the first time proved and fully illustrated is Theobald's contribution to scholarship—the excellence of his methods and the influence he exerted on his successors. By the close of the century 'the modern method of critical editing [was] fairly well outlined and established'. To no individual is this so much due as to Theobald, Pope's dunce,'who first applied to English scholarship the scientific methods of Bentley, but combined with aesthetic penetration not possessed by the greater man.

In a brief article on Joseph Warton's Criticism of Pope12 the present writer shows the extent to which Warton cut up his Essay on Pope to form the notes and introduction to the edition of the poems published twenty years later. Not merely this, but he was meticulously careful to omit nothing, however unimportant, from the later work that had appeared in the earlier. So much is this the case, that one half of the original sentence often appears in one volume and the rest in another of the 'Complete Works'.

Ronald Crane and Hamilton Jewett Smith illustrate13 in some detail 'the close filiation which exists between the Citizen of the World and the Lettres Chinoises of the Marquis d'Argens.' The article shows that Goldsmith's borrowings from this source explain various features in the Citizen of the World and throw light on his methods of composition. But 'they account for none of the traits which constitute the essential originality of Goldsmith's work'.

In an article in Essays and Studies,14 Canon Cruickshank 'ventures to claim' that Parnell 'deserves to be read again', and

12 Joseph Warton's Criticism of Pope, by Edith J. Morley. Modern Language Notes (of America), xxxvi, no. 5, May 1921. pp. 276–81.

13 A French Influence on Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, by Ronald Crane and Hamilton Jewett Smith. Modern Philology, xix, no. 1, August 1921. pp. 83–92.

14 Thomas Parnell, or What was wrong with the Eighteenth Century, by A. H. Cruickshank. Essays and Studies by Members of the English Associa-

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he supports his contention by an examination of the writings and

reputation of that half-forgotten poet. The sub-title of the essay,

' What was wrong with the Eighteenth Century ', is perhaps hardly

justified by the cursory discussion given to the subject.

Mr. John W. Draper15 in a discussion in the Publications of

the Modern Language Association of America, traces 'the

semantic history of μίμησις' in the eighteenth century, showing

that it 'reflects the period of authority during the first third of the

century, and the period, during the middle decades, of scientif-

inquiry and of sentimental reaction, which later passed into the

age of Romantic revolt'. The article is a valuable contribution to

the study of Aristotelian influence on English criticism.

In Neophilologus16 the same author writes on 'The Theory of

Translation in the Eighteenth Century'.

It is not without melancholy that one remembers that for the

'Later' of the title-page, the reader must substitute 'Last', and

that these Essays17 of Austin Dobson will be followed by no new

ones by the same hand. For, as one reads them, one realizes afresh

his lightness of touch and the learning which it enhances. Surely

no one now living can steer so securely among the shoals of the

eighteenth century, or can reproduce for us the great figures and

small whom he knew so intimately that he could revivify them in

half a dozen pages? In this, the tenth volume of the writer's

studies, mainly in the century he loved, he deals with only one

man of first-rate importance, John Howard, the prison reformer,

but in by-paths as on the high road he is a guide to be followed,

and he touches nothing which he does not adorn. The Abbé

Edgeworth, 'Hermes' Harris, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter the blue-

stocking, Edwards of the 'Canons of Criticism', and Dr. Heberden

are the subjects of the essays in this volume, which concludes with

tion, vol. vii. Collected by John Bailey. pp. 57-81. Clarendon Press, 1921.

5s. net.

15 Aristotelean 'Mimesis' in England, by John W. Draper. P. M. L. A.,

vol. xxxvi, No. 3, September 1921. pp. 372-400.

16 The Theory of Translation in the Eighteenth Century, by John W.

Draper. Neophilologus.

17 Later Essays, 1917-20, by Austin Döbson. Humphrey Milford, Oxford

University Press, 1921. 180 pp. 6s. 6d. net.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 139

'A Casual Causerie' ranging over a variety of subjects. Every page bears upon it the stamp of that personal knowledge which enabled the writer to recreate the eighteenth century for others as well as for himself. In default of the cap of Fortunatus, the volumes of Austin Dobson are the best means by which to become cognisant of the very form and pressure of the period he knew better than any of his contemporaries.

In The Tale of Terror,18 Miss Birkhead gives a detailed and thorough account of the blood-curdling volumes which thrilled readers during the period of the 'romantic revival', and she recounts the plots—good, bad, and indifferent—without losing either her sense of humour or her power of discrimination. This is in itself no inconsiderable feat when, as she reminds us, even Henry Tilney shared Catherine Morland's delight in the 'horrid' stories recommended by Miss Andrews, and when a still better judge, no less a man than Sir Walter Scott, at one time began such a tale on his own account.

Miss Birkhead has produced a readable book about tales, many of which are no longer readable, and her 'attempt to trace in outline the origin of the Gothic romance' is justified by its success. The introductory chapter seems to us to go too far in its search for origins, even though it is balanced by a conclusion, which attempts to deal with the present-day equivalent of the genre. Or, perhaps it would be better to recast this criticism and say that while we agree that 'the future of the tale of terror it is impossible to predict', we feel that Miss Birkhead would have been wiser to decide definitely between two modes of treatment. She might have confined herself strictly to the 'Tale of Terror', properly so-called, i. e. that which was directly inspired by or akin to The Castle of Otranto, and belonged to the last years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Or, and this would have given more scope for original criticism, she might have examined the motive of terror in art and literature with a view to determining the aesthetic effect and value of the thrill (e.g. in Grand Guignol melodrama). As it is, the brief introductory remarks and the last chapters give the impression of being

18 The Tale of Terror, A Study of the Gothic Romance, by Edith Birkhead, M.A. Constable & Co., 1921. xi +241 pp. 15s. net.

140 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

tacked-on to a subject of which they do not form an integral part,

while the underlying connexion is not made sufficiently clear. It

is stretching the term to breaking-point to include Stevenson’s

New Arabian Nights or Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast in

A Study of the Gothic Romance: with them, and long before them,

a tale of terror is something very different from The Tale of Terror

which is Miss Birkhead’s subject. This she would doubtless

readily admit : she might even protest that she ‘had explicitly

stated it as a fact. But any one who read, say Chapter X (Short Tales

of Terror) without previous knowledge of the subject, might easily

be led to confuse the terrible in fiction with ‘The Tale of Terror’

properly so-called. In a work so erudite and, with this exception,

so well-balanced, the mere possibility is a misfortune. For Miss

Birkhead’s study of The Tale of Terror is a valuable addition to

our knowledge of the subject, and it is one which must be taken

into account by all who wish to understand the popularity of the

story that

‘Lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons’.

Readers of Miss Birkhead’s book may like to supplement it

by reference to two articles which have recently appeared in the

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.19

Associate-Professor McIntyre elaborates the theory that the novels

of Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers are not an expression of the

life and spirit of the Middle Ages, but of those of the Renaissance

as interpreted by Elizabethan England. She considers that the

term Gothic Novel is inaccurate, and that the epithet must not

be taken to imply too much. Mrs. Radcliffe was more indebted

to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage than to the Middle

Ages.

Professor Shackford finds ‘certain indefinable likenesses in spirit

and atmosphere’ between Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes and Mrs. Rad-

cliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, and she also gives a selection of

parallel passages which, she thinks, show that Keats drew some

of the suggestions for the poem from his knowledge of the novel.

19 Were the ‘Gothic Novels’ Gothic? by Clara F. McIntyre. P. M. L. A.,

vol. xxxvi, No. 4, December 1921. pp. 644–67. The Eve of St. Agnes, and

‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’, by Martha Hale Shackford. P. M. L. A., vol.

xxxvi, No. 1, March 1921. pp. 104–13.

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141

She is, however, careful to insist that Keats used his reminiscences in an intensely imaginative and independent fashion, and that to find in Mrs. Radcliffe one of his sources is in no way to impugn his originality, but just the reverse.

Mr. Finch and Professor Peers contribute to Modern Philology a detailed account of the controversy between Voltaire and Horace Walpole on the respective merits of Shakespeare and of Corneille and Racine. The letters they publish prove that, as early as 1768, Voltaire already repeated ‘having introduced the histrion barbare to French readers’. They also show Walpole willing to ‘fight to the death for the superiority of Shakespeare’.

The Florence Press edition of Blake's poetry is complete but for the Prophetic Books and the unfinished French Revolution, the text being that of Dr. Sampson's Oxford edition of 1905. ‘There is something’, says the editor, ‘of homage and fitness in producing the poems of Blake in a form which would have appealed to that artist-poet, and in a character—this Florence type—which for him might well have symbolized the birthplace of his hero Michel-angelo. True, we must relinquish the exquisite designs which Blake interwove with the fabric of his verse, yet there may still be a positive advantage in reading these poems as poetry and nothing more, rather than in viewing them as “fairy missals” or as “pictures singing”. Our text too . . . is a faithful reproduction of the original. . .’

There is no need to say more of the text than that Dr. Sampson is the editor, and that he makes for it this claim of accuracy. The Florence type, designed by the late Herbert P. Horne, and modelled on the Italian masterpieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is by this time well known to all book lovers as ‘one of the ‘foremost representatives of the modern typographical revival in Great Britain’. The fount is severely simple with all the beauty of simplicity, and the book is in every respect as

Walpole's Relations with Voltaire, by M. R. Finch and E. Allison Peers. Modern Philology, August 1920. pp. 189–200.

The Poems of William Blake, edited and arranged with a Preface by John Sampson, D.Litt. At the Florence Press : Chatto & Windus, 1921. xxxviii +344 pp. 15s. net.

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well-produced as good editing, good workmanship, and good material can make it. To possess it is to be 'born to Sweet Delight'-we think Blake need not have resented this application of his words, much as it may differ from their original meaning.

In his booklet on Blake and Milton,22 Dr. Saurat endeavours to establish the existence of 'a peculiar relationship' between these two poets. He shows first of all that Milton exercised a direct influence over Blake, who draws many of his conceptions from Paradise Lost. Further, Dr. Saurat maintains that there is 'remarkable similarity of mind and temperament' between them; that there are close parallels between 'their central conception of life' and their 'general metaphysical outlook, and particularly in their way of dealing with dogma or myth'. These theses he supports by a detailed examination of the writings of both poets, which, if not entirely convincing, at any rate suggests interesting points of comparison and shows a great deal of industry. It is not easy to prove that 'Blake and Milton came to metaphysical questions with much the same intellectual methods', or that the mysticism of Blake is really but another form of Milton's creed that 'all of us are of God'. Superficially, no doubt, there is similarity between these positions. But the two men gain their faith in a different way; and Blake's vision and 'double vision' appear to be fundamentally different from Milton's belief that there are 'allegorical explanations' underlying the 'exactitude of the historical narrative' of the Gospels. Blake's attempt to explain his mythology may sometimes approach rationalism, but the visions upon which it is founded are those of a mystic, while, as Dr. Saurat himself admits, Milton's whole outlook is determined by reason. 'Milton's reason bade him try to mend this world; and Blake's desire attempted to create another.'

Dr. Keynes's Bibliography of Blake23 is an exhaustive compilation which is worthy of its subject. It must nearly approach

22 Blake and Milton, by Denis Saurat. Librairie Félix Alcan. Paris, 1920. 75 pp. 9 francs + majoration de 20 per cent. du prix marqué.

23 A Bibliography of William Blake, by Geoffrey Keynes. For the Grolier Club of New York. London : Chiswick Press, 1921. xvi +516 pp. 250 copies printed, of which 220 are for sale at $50 to members of the Grolier Club.

bibliographical completeness, and scholars will be grateful both to him and to the American collectors who have furthered his monumental work. Dr. Keynes has achieved the purpose with which he set out. The Bibliography 'is not a mere catalogue of Blake's works and of books connected with him '; it will serve, as was intended, 'as a foundation upon which future studies, whether bicgraphical or critical, may be securely built'.

The volume is divided into five main sections, entitled respectively Blake's Works, Book Illustrations, Biography and Criticism, Miscellaneous: in addition there are six appendices and an admirable Index which adds to the pleasure of the reader. Each section is prefixed by a bibliographical preface; there are four full-page reproductions in colour, forty reproductions in mono-chrome, and twelve reproductions in the text. It would be a pleasant task to describe in some detail the points made by Dr. Keynes in his prefaces or the hitherto unpublished letters by Blake. For this there is no space, but students of Blake will have reason to be grateful for the consequent necessity to seek out the volume for themselves. The one drawback we can find to this luxurious edition is that it is inevitably so limited in numbers.

Dr. Keynes will doubtless rejoice to learn that the annotated autograph transcript by Blake of passages from the preface to Wordsworth's Excursion and from The Recluse referred to on p. 54, in the note to 21, has not, as he supposes, disappeared. It is preserved among Crabb Robinson's Remains at Dr. Williams's Library, Gordon Square, London, and a copy is included in a volume of extracts from the Remains, published this autumn at the Manchester University Press.

Dr. McNaught is well known as an enthusiastic admirer of Burns, and in this book 24 he endeavours finally to dispose of the myths that have grown up about the poet's life and character by giving The Truth about Burns. The early biographers had, he tells us, 'little or no first-hand knowledge of their subject . . . and never was the private life and personality of a great man so ruthlessly invaded and barbarously dissected ' as by them. Further,

24 The Truth about Burns, by D. McNaught, J.P., LL.D. Maclehose, Jackson & Co., 1921. x + 246 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

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the truculent tone adopted by some recent commentators has roused a strong feeling of resentment in Burnsian circles which has begotten a determination to put everything recorded by the biographers to the test of contemporary evidence and that which has come to light since their day’. This test Dr. McNaught applies with skill and with knowledge, and he succeeds in disproving some of the accusations commonly brought against the poet, e.g. that he was an habitual drunkard. As is justly observed, ‘Burns’s physical constitution was an effectual bar to chronic dissipation’. Dr. McNaught is prejudiced in the poet’s favour, but his evidence is judicially examined and presented in a balanced way. It should be unnecessary further to labour his points, though it is perhaps too much to hope that future commentators will pass over in silence the unsavoury stories which have collected about the poet’s biography.

If any University woman of the twentieth century is misguided enough to believe that her female ancestors were necessarily debarred from the pursuit of letters, this exhaustive volume 25 by Professor Myra Reynolds should finally disabuse her of her error. The learned lady in England as elsewhere did not find the way made easy for her, especially in the eighteenth century, but many individuals surmounted difficulties with wonderful patience and tenacity, and by their success helped to win intellectual freedom for their successors. Indeed Professor Reynolds goes so far as to say that ‘Macaulay’s statement concerning the illiteracy of the women of the period may have some justification, but the exceptions are so numerous as almost to disprove the rule’. Whether or no this be true, as one studies her bulky volume one is at least convinced that she has amply carried out her purpose ‘to show the number of women whose interests were intellectual, whose chosen pursuits had to do with books and things of the mind, and who were demanding a new freedom of self-expression, new training, and new opportunities’. The book forms a fitting contribution to a series ‘published in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Vassar College’—the first women’s college in the States. However, it must not be regarded in any sense as

25 The Learned Lady in England, 1650–1760, by Myra Reynolds. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920. 489 pp. $2.23.

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145

a feminist manifesto. Professor Reynolds has no axe to grind. She does honour to many women whose names have, some of them, been almost forgotten, and have never before been collected within the covers of a single book. From Dame Juliana of Norwich to Margaret Roper, from Lady Jane Grey to Mrs. Delany, from Mary Astell and Elizabeth Elstob to the women diarists, letter- and memoir-writers and novelists, 'here is God's plenty'. Yet of those coming within the limits of her title, Professor Reynolds acknowledges honestly 'the writing done by women between 1660 and 1760 is more impressive from its amount and variety than from any high excellence of its component parts'. And again: 'What was actually accomplished in the century before 1760 was a lavish sowing of seed, a steady infiltration of new ideas, and an accumulation of examples proving women capable of the most varied intellectual aptitudes and energies'.

One other of the many points brought out by Professor Reynolds is worth emphasis here. She notes that the standard of morality exhibited in Restoration comedy cannot be regarded as typical even of aristocratic society of the time, however representative it may be of one phase of it. 'Margaret Blagge, Anne Killigrew, and Anne Kingsmill, women of the most sincere and ardent piety, were in intimate association with the courts of Charles II and James II. Lady Pakington, Lady Brooke, Lady Halkett, Lady Masham, Lady Russell, Mary Astell, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and later, Lady Huntingdon, were all by rank or especial opportunity in the highest and most exclusive social circles and so in contact with the profligacy of the court. Their extreme assiduity in all matters of religion . . . and their austere moral standards were a violent reaction from the evil life about them. In the homes and small social circles where their influence could be felt was being prepared a body of moral indignation, a desire for uprightness and purity of life, that gave to Jeremy Collier's attack on the stage in 1698 so overwhelming a response, and that was the sustaining force back of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.'

In this, as in most matters, loose generalizations have to be corrected by more exact knowledge. Professor Reynolds's study

2622

K

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is an excellent example of the way in which a close examination

of detail may be used by a scholar to illuminate large social

processes and movements. In her book, if the particular is not

lost sight of in the general, neither is the general forgotten in

the particular.

'The history of English village literature since 1750 becomes

a chapter in the social history of England, and it is from this

point of view that the present study 26 is written.' 'In this study,

therefore, village literature connects itself on the one side with

conventions of the pastoral and Georgic; with heroic couplet and

English prose and new verse-forms; with eighteenth-century

sentimentalism and the romantic movement. On the other side

it connects itself with the growth of a democratic spirit in an

aristocratic age; with two great movements, the industrial

revolution and the less familiar but almost more fundamental

agrarian revolution.' These sentences set forth very fairly

Dr. Patton's aims and her achievement. In her second and third

chapters, 'From the Medieval Village to the Modern', and 'The

Changing Village and the National Life', she gives a clear

and a convincing account of the changes which revolutionized

the English village, altering it from a co-operative unit with

genuine community life to the competitive society of the present

day. The social and economic developments and their conse-

quences are traced with so much understanding of the forces

at work that at first the reader is inclined to doubt whether the

'literary study' will show equal grasp and ability. The fear is

groundless. In the chapters which follow ('The Village established

in Literature, 1770–1800', and 'The Village in Poetry, 1800–1850 '),

Miss Patton, in a carefully documented survey, proves that her

critical and literary judgement has not been submerged by her

interest in economics. She has read very widely, both great poets

and small, and she is able to discriminate between the value of

contributions to literature and of those solely to the illumination

of her subject. Her independence comes out in many places, and

not least in her treatment of Goldsmith. She proves, for example,

that in spite of the authorities, his portrayal of The Deserted

26 The English Village, A Literary Study, 1750–1850, by Julia Patton, Ph.D.

New York: The Macmillan Co., 1919. xi + 236 pp. $1.50.

Village represented what was actually happening all over the country. This fact does not blind her to the truth that his idyllic Auburn gives more ‘aesthetic enjoyment’, and that the ‘didactic motive’ of the poem is rightly put in the background by lovers of poetry. ‘Yet for the student of literature in its historical significance . . . it is important also to relate the poem to that body of fact which research in English social history has within the last ten years brought to view.’

Many of her conclusions are equally convincing, but it is impossible to detail them at equal length. We may perhaps find room for one more, which casts light on much of the poetry written between 1750 and 1850 : ‘Literature, which always lags behind events, long persisted in picturing the old order, and it is the old village which in the very days of its disappearance from the land, came into a new life in the literature of the nation.’

Mr. Chancellor’s book on The Eighteenth Century in London 27 contains a remarkable series of illustrations, principally reproduced from the works of contemporary artists, thus ‘enabling us to see the seventeenth century through the eyes of those who lived and laboured during the period’. Here we may enter the pleasure resorts of the day, Ranelagh, Vauxhall, or Bagnigge Wells ; we may visit fairs and markets, and executions, view election scenes, water-pageants and processions, contrast London streets and houses of the time with those of our own period, form part of the audience at Covent Garden Theatre, or of the congregation at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields—in short, share in every activity of ‘the town’ when London was, as never before or since, the centre of English national life.

It is not altogether Mr. Chancellor’s fault that his letter-press is relatively unimportant when thus brought into rivalry with the work of Hogarth, Rowlandson, Samuel Scott, Canaletto, Dayes, Sandby, and many other famous artists. He has collected plates which provide a lifelike background for students of the century, who owe him a tribute of thanks for the success which has crowned his labours.

27 The Eighteenth Century in London: an Account of its Social Life and Arts, by E. Beresford Chancellor. B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1920. vii + 271 pp. 191 illustrations. 35s. net.

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His own account of the century is divided into eight chapters,

dealing respectively with social life, street topography, pleasure

resorts, clubs, coffee-houses and taverns, great houses and public

buildings, churches, the arts, and architectural relics of the period.

Here, too, he relies to a large extent on contemporary sources of

information, and the reader of the book is thus put in a position

to draw his own conclusions about the social conditions of the

time, and to consult for himself the authorities to whom Mr.

Chancellor refers. From this point of view also the volume is

a valuable possession.

XI

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I

1800–1860

[By C. H. Herford]

I. GENERAL WORKS

In A Survey of English Literature, 1830–80,1 as in its predecessor, his ‘Survey’ of our literature from 1780 to 1830, Professor Oliver Elton approaches and presents literature in a fashion which, on this scale, is new. Instead of a ‘literary history’ of the half-century, with critical remarks thrown in, his book is, primarily, a continuous and systematic critical appreciation of the literature, with just so much background of literary history as, since Sainte-Beuve at least, it is a commonplace that just and final criticism requires. And with this salutary tightening-up of method goes a greater stringency in the conception of literature itself, a stringency never out of place, but quite imperative in any coherent ‘survey’ of the huge welter of nineteenth-century writing. De Quincey countered one of its standing dilemmas by his distinction between ‘the literature of knowledge’ and ‘the literature of power’. Professor Elton better satisfies the postulate that literature, in any worthy sense, must display power, and power of writing, by his introduction of the term ‘applied literature’ for books which, while possessing the vital quality of ‘form’, without which they would not, for him, be literature at all, seek, as philosophy, science, or scholarship, to convey information or to influence action. The Divine Comedy and some other supreme things will always confound these categories, and in an age teeming with ideas and deeply aware of urgent needs, like

1 A Survey of English Literature (1830-1890). By Oliver Elton. 2 vols. E. Arnold. xvi+434 & xi+432 pp.

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that here in question, the conception of ‘pure’ literature as crea-

tive art is apt to strain a little, as it were, at the leash; so many

of the greatest writers ‘applied’ their creative art not purely for

art’s sake. Mr. Elton finds, in fact, that ‘applied’ and ‘pure’

literature were nearly balanced in this period, and that this

proximate balance is one of its characteristic traits. Certainly

the twelve (out of his twenty-six) chapters given to ‘applied’

literature illustrate admirably, what is apparent throughout the

book, the large good sense and versatility of critical perception,

which guide his handling of these and other distinctions, and

secure him from the pitfalls to which they allure. Thus, while

his dislike of ‘preaching’ is patent, and his interest in ‘ideas’

plainly does not equal his interest in style, his insistence upon

art is no Rossettian religion of the studio ; he accepts ‘the intel-

lectual stir of the time’, and even its ‘reforming passion’, as

forces which not merely ‘overflow’ but ‘extend’ the artist’s

territory, and even ‘prompt the inventions of new literary

forms’: ‘The condition-of-England question’, as Carlyle un-

couthly called it, and the enthusiasm of humanity, are on the

whole good for literature, and put blood into its veins. Yet, on

a total view, the influence of these ‘excitement, indignations,

ideals, and speculations’ is, particularly in poetry, exceptional.

Two other traits which Mr. Elton finds characteristic of these

fifty years are clearly connected with this insurgence, if one may

use the figure, of ‘applied’ literature, though very far from being

confined to it : the ‘swift and splendid development of the art of

prose’, and a ‘pervading nobility of temper’. Both judgements

are those of no Victorian apologist but of a discriminating critic,

sufficiently near, by birth and training, to the Victorians to

understand them, and sufficiently detached, by ripe and many-

sided culture, to see them objectively. Much of the most sterling

and lasting work in these volumes revises both the earlier and

the later type of judgement, by the simple process of approaching

a writer with no other bias than an exacting literary taste, and

with a palate sensitive to many kinds of literary excellence.

Good examples are found in the case of men who, like Macaulay,

Froude, or Carlyle, have suffered both from idolatries and from

iconoclasms. Arnold called Macaulay’s style ‘metallic’, and the

epithet stuck. Mr. Elton feels it as much as any one else, and

he adopts the criticism, but with a comment which at once deepens its grip, limits its scope, and alters its complexion:

'Turn from a plain natural writer of the higher kind like Goldsmith, . . . and you may feel that Macaulay's sentences are fed out of a machine: a wonderful machine, because it is the very mind of the man. . . . Yet this is only the style in its lowest terms. There is, it is true, a certain framework of rhetoric and rhythm . . . out of which Macaulay seldom escapes. It has the merit of being wholly natural to him; it is not a thing learnt or affected, though it may be thought by the enemy to be all the more fatal for that. But, within that framework, it is one of the most skilful, and also of the most varied, of styles. For one thing, its abruptness of effect is often a mere matter of punctuation. The short snappy-seeming clauses are not really isolated, but unite into an harmonious group that satisfies the ear as a whole, and only as a whole; they are the minor ups and downs in a long rolling wave.'

Grote, in many obvious senses a bad writer, is a severer test, and Mr. Elton does not spare his defects:

'Herodotus becomes heavy in hand, and "the condensed and burning phrases of Thucydides", as Grote calls them, lose their virtue. Yet somehow we read Grote, and that not merely for his matter. He swings along in an ugly, powerful stride. The greatness of the subject does get into his language. . . . He had never been to Greece; he does not describe scenery; like all his school, he rather thinks than sees; yet he communicates the passion of the scene.'

On a much lower level, Mr. Elton's unfailing eye for good writing singles out the virtue of men like the painter Haydon, in whom it is swamped, in general repute, by their vanity and other absurd qualities. 'Haydon [in his autobiography], unlike most painters, often finds the only right words for his visual impressions'—with instances from his wonderful discriminations of the eyes of O'Connell and Brougham—where the trained perception of the painter clearly counted for much.

And if we turn to the highest levels of all, it is through his eye for good writing, admirably supple and comprehensive as it is, that Mr. Elton's work is most individual. Needless to say, his Carlyle superbly vindicates the great Thomas from what yet remains of the flood of cheap and insolent disparagement let loose by Froude. Needless to say, either, that his handling of

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Carlyle's 'ideas', and the complex story of the German infiltrations, and the Puritan staple, say in Sartor, is scholarly and able in a high degree, if somewhat, but not too obviously, from the outside. Yet he is perhaps even more serviceable in passages of this kind, where he is tracing the less obtrusively Carlylean features of Carlyle's style :

'He is a master of prose that is just doing the day's work of prose; and his indescribable nerve and virility give him an advantage over more reserved and finished writers, like Thackeray and Newman, of his own time. He has, when all is said, a better eye and a better mind than most of them, and he gives a stronger satisfaction. Genius, like generalship, is not all grand strategy; much of it comes down to a series of small strokes, each of them going an inch further than mere talent can manage.'

Or where he is contrasting the 'mannerisms' of Carlyle, which are 'everywhere his own, himself', with the imitated mannerisms of the followers of Macaulay, the trick of a hundred journalists : 'There is more style, more literature, in an ounce of Carlyle, than in a ton of such work'. The academic critic is commonly repelled by Carlyle's stylistic oddities, the plain enthusiast scornfully dismisses the inquiry into the 'style' of a seer as vain; Mr. Elton's critical sense has been moulded by the finest academic culture to discern virtue utterly beyond the academic pale. Nothing short of this critical humanitas, at once schooled and open-minded, erudite and free, could have sufficed for the adequate 'survey' of such a field as this. And it pervades and informs the whole book.

The poetry of the period clearly, as has been said, does not overshadow the prose, as it did in the previous generation, but it asks at least as much acute discernment from the critic of style. Browning, like Meredith, has many notes that vibrate for the twentieth century; but the Victorian idol Tennyson has suffered some damage, and a former lecture by Mr. Elton himself bore evidence of that 'reaction'. His discussion in the present book modifies that attitude, while leaving it, naturally, far on this side of idolatry. The union in Tennyson of something primeval and elemental in mind and character with an immensely curious, brilliant, and versatile artistry makes the study

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800-1860

153

of his work full of reward for the discriminating student of

style. Mr. Elton notes, for instance, 'the struggle' (in the poet

of the thirties), 'or rather now the fusion, between his instinct

for complexity and his instinct for simplicity. In Tithonus the

former rules; but in Ulysses the latter rules; 'the heroic style,

in its plainness and strength', but with moments (as in the

'experience' image) of 'his spontaneous intricacy of musical

metaphor', and his 'full, cunning vowelling'. Among many other

instances of happy observation may be noted the distinction

between the self-consciousness of Tennyson, as an artist, and

that of Milton, who, 'intensely as he studies his form, forgets

himself more often than Tennyson does in the passion or exalta-

tion of his subject'; or, though this is more obvious, between

the 'immense luck' of Browning's finest strokes, and Tennyson's

waiting and watching for perfection, which, when found, misses

something that the other's 'happy gambling' achieved.

The last third of the book is given to the Novel, admittedly

the kind of creative literature in which the English mind of this

period found its most congenial field, and reached its widest and

perhaps most lasting vogue. The number of novels of a quality

to demand notice in a Survey so largely planned as this, was,

during these fifty years, formidably large; and only those who

have tried to grapple with similar problems of sifting and

assaying can do justice to a critical record which never becomes

vague, or dry, or second-hand, or schematic, or journalistic, or

weakly indulgent, or cruelly severe. Dickens and Thackeray test

a critic's power to be fresh in dealing with the most beaten

themes; George Eliot, his power of controlling and revising

contemporary and fashionable bias. What is most distinctive is,

as before, the treatment of style; now in discriminative analysis

of manners, in talk or description, dialogue or comment (so marked

in George Eliot); now its psychological effect upon the sensitive

reader, or again upon the writer himself, hypnotized with his

own art; to give but one example:

'All distinctions between the clay, the rubble, the Porian marble

and the Parian, in Thackeray, tend to be hidden by his good

English, which gives him his smooth unbroken façade, and too

easily keeps us quiet. Writers like Dickens warn us at once

of their bad work by their bad writing.'

154 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800-1860

It may be added that at numerous points in these volumes Mr. Elton applies in an interesting way the analysis of prose rhythms discussed by him in a valuable English Association essay, as previously by Professor Saintsbury.

But lest the impression should have been given that this ‘Survey’ deals but cursorily with the matters of moment in literature which lie outside style, let us conclude with these few sentences on Thackeray and Tolstoy—not a hackneyed comparison :

‘The passion for seeing things truly, and the transparent style that goes along with it, and this observant humanity and breadth of scale, we find alike in Thackeray and Tolstoy. . . . Thackeray has his own advantages; among them is a far more pervasive wit and humour. . . . Nor is he burdened with the wrong sort of conscience or intellect. . . . He is a portrayer, not a theorist. All this may consist with excellent art, and may even be to the good; in George Eliot we see how philosophical luggage may harm a novelist. But, after all, such art can hardly be so deep or strong as the art which, like that of Tolstoy in his good days, can really carry the luggage. We have but to look at Prince Andrey lying wounded after Austerlitz, with his sense of the secret of the infinite skies above him, . . . or at Pierre, in the masonic lodge, feeling the new birth of human sympathy in his heart; to see what a world of real experience lies outside Thackeray’s calculations. Nor is it simply the world of the mystical intellect.’

This is not, in the ordinary sense, a review; but we may be permitted to salute, in conclusion, the ‘Surveyor’ who has coped single-handed with the entire momentous century of English letters which lies behind us, and has made especially the last fifty years of it, where fewer had gone before him, at least as accessible and as fruitful both to the student and to the discoverer as any previous age of our literature.

In L’Évolution psychologique et la Littérature en Angleterre, 1660-1914,2 Professor L. Cazamian offers a confessedly tentative, but masterly, sketch of the ‘psychology’ of our national development, the most important sections of which bear upon this period. M. Cazamian’s book on the Roman social en Angleterre 1830–1850 (1904) is already a classic ; the present volume, slighter in

2 Paris: Félix Alcan. 269 pp. 12 fr.

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155

appearance because it deals with laws and tendencies and only inci-

dentally with concrete facts, presupposes detailed studies no less

thorough and precise, and the same fruitful alliance of the analyst

of society, in industry and politics, and the analyst of mind, in

literature and art. The attempt to reduce the 'interior develop-

ment' of a literature to law is not new, and is in England with

some reason suspect; the two celebrated French enterprises of

this kind, those of Taine and Brunetière, have both, as M. Caza-

mian says, proved ephemeral. But the need of clear lines in the

welter of detail remains urgent, and every survey of the literary

history of a period or of a people makes some kind of attempt,

mostly with insufficient apparatus, to provide them. It would

be irrelevant, in this section, to discuss M. Cazamian's method of

procedure at large. It will suffice to say that he discovers in our

national evolution a rhythmic progress, determined by an alter-

nate dominance of the emotional and the intellectual factors of

mind. The former is the psychological base or ground-tone of

the 'Romantic' periods—the age of the Elizabethans, of Words-

worth and Byron, and finally of the anti-intellectualist reaction of

our own day. The latter is the psychological base of the inter-

vening periods, the 'Classical' or 'Augustan' age of Pope, and

the 'Victorian' return to convention and realism. But the sim-

plicity of this rhythmic pattern is disturbed and complicated by

social, political, economic factors, and the distinction and impor-

tance of M. Cazamian's book lies in his subtle and lucid interpre-

tation of the intricate play of these disparate forces. Thus the

industrial revolution of the later eighteenth century, though wholly

remote from the incipient Romanticism of literature, yet contri-

buted to the break-up of the old social order which is presupposed

in Wordsworth and Shelley. And while Romanticism everywhere

took the form of impassioned revolt against convention or

against law, the cause of political and economic freedom and

'laissez-faire' was championed by hardheaded reasoners, the God-

wins and Bentham's later to be denounced by the great Roman-

tic Carlyle, and in their own day, but in the name of an inflexible

conservatism, by the great pre-Romantic Burke. But Romanti-

cism itself, across whose origins and growth these cross-currents

played, culminated not in any logical process, but in Words-

worth's discovery of the emotional power over heart, thought, and

156 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800-1860

conduct resident in common things and in common words ; so that the ‘ simplicity ’ which he preaches and practises is a, ‘ penetrating and penetrated simplicity ’, ‘ a spiritual exaltation which multiplies the expressive coefficient of terms, or what is the same thing, the coefficient of suggestion of things, by heightening the mean tone of perception and emotion in the soul ’. The traits which separate the ‘ second generation of Romanticism ’ from the first—Shelley and Keats and Byron from Wordsworth and Coleridge, are firmly and delicately traced. M. Cazamian will hear nothing of the view which regards Shelley as a beautiful anomaly in the England of his day; on the contrary, while ‘ Byron was a Romantic better adapted to continental than to native taste, and Keats a Romantic without parallel anywhere, Shelley was the English Romantic ’. For (as is excellently pointed out) it is a trait of the English race ‘ to transcend, at rare and supreme moments, in accesses of mystic exaltation, the positive and utilitarian preoccupations of its daily thought. No one ever carried these accesses further or higher than Shelley ’.

As the ‘ evolution ’ approaches our own time, the elements become more entangled, and their apparent relations more illusory. But the history of the ‘ transitional ’ years 1830-50—the subject of M. Cazamian's more detailed work—and of the ‘ Mid-Victorian ’ neo-classicism, rationalism, and realism, which culminates and closes towards 1880, gain in clearness from his analysis, though the clearness results not from simplification but from a precise articulation of complicated facts.

Walter Graham, Politics of the Greater Romantic Poets (Publ. Mod. L. Ass., xxxvi. 1), passes briefly in review the political utterances of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, Scott, Byron, and Shelley, distinguishing the shades in the ‘ Toryism of the three first, and the Liberalism of the two last, and concluding that all were less interested in local and temporary affairs than in what Coleridge called ‘ the permanent politics of human nature ’.

Although Victorian Worthies, by G. H. Blore 3 is avowedly based mainly upon standard biographies, and designed for boys, it may properly claim a word of notice here. The

3 Victorian Worthies, by G. H. Blore. Oxford: The University Press. viii + 376 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

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157

sixteen 'worthies' chosen for these concise and freshly written

biographies have not all been the subject of monographs;

information about several, as Lister, Patteson the missionary,

and J. R. Green, is not easily accessible; of one, Morier,

the famous ambassador at St. Petersburg in the eighties,

no biography exists. The choice of men is dictated by a large

apprehension of the varied kinds of power and self-devotion

which were put to the service of England in the slighted Vic-

torian age, and the separate biographies are preceded by a brief

but excellent sketch of the characteristics of that age. Many more

pretentious books make a less adequate introduction to it.

II. SINGLE WRITERS. I. WORDSWORTH 4

In 1916 Professor Harper in his elaborate study of 'William

Wordsworth' produced some previously unknown facts about

the poet's life in France in 1791-2. In this brief treatise 5 he

proves conclusively that a daughter was born to him in Orleans

on December 15, 1792, that she was acknowledged by him at

baptism, and that the mother was Marie Anne Léonard, dite

Vallon, who afterwards called herself Madame Vallon, though

she never married. The daughter, with her father's formal

consent, married under the name of Catherine Wordsworth, and

became Madame Baudouin on February 20, 1816. Wordsworth

and his wife and Dorothy Wordsworth all corresponded with and

visited both mother and daughter, and many of Wordsworth's

friends, among others Crabb Robinson, Mrs. Clarkson, Miss

Hutehinson, Mr. and Mrs. Monkhouse, Helen Maria Williams (the

minor novelist), knew the story, and some of them, Crabb Robin-

son for example, were acquainted with mother and daughter.

There is no question that this early love-affair casts new light on

Wordsworth's character and on the moral crisis through which

he passed in 1792-3. Professor Harper explains the almost

insuperable difficulties in the way of marriage between the

4 [The sections on Harper's Wordsworth's French Daughter and the new

edition of Legouis' Early Life of Wordsworth are by Professor Edith Morley,

and are transferred here from Chapter X.—Eds.]

5 Wordsworth's French Daughter : the Story of her Birth with the Certificates

of her Baptism and Marriage, by George McLean Harper. Princeton

University Press, and Oxford University Press, 1921. 41 pp. 4s. 6d. net.

158 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800–1860

young English revolutionary, with his Protestant upbringing, and the French Catholic Royalist, who refused to accept the decree of July 12, 1790, which made the priests servants of the State. He cannot explain why Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, just after his visit to Annette and her child. That Mary was acquainted with the story at the time we are assured. Mr. Harper adds, and every one must agree with his statement: ‘What seems almost unbelievable and can indeed only be explained on the ground that Mrs. Wordsworth was a woman of extraordinary magnanimity and that he (Wordsworth) inspired in her a sense of his own goodness, is the fact that she, with a company of relatives and friends, should have been willing to visit Annette.’

The chief importance of the story to students of literature is that it finally does away with the absurd supposition that Wordsworth was not acquainted with the passion of love, and corroborates his own statement: ‘But me has Nature tamed’. He had deliberately overcome his turbulent nature in order that mystic insight might be his. He was neither cold nor calm in disposition, and he gained self-control as he gained his knowledge of nature, first by active effort and only afterwards by the ‘wise passiveness’ of the seer.

Professor Legouis’ Early Life of Wordsworth 6 is well known to English readers as an admirable study of the development of the poet's mind. Not even Mr. Harper's more recent work has superseded this detailed and sympathetic treatment of the subject, and the new edition with its additional appendix is assured of a welcome. M. Legouis has not appreciably altered the text of his work, which therefore does not call for further description here, but in his appendix he has incorporated an account of Mr. Harper's discoveries about the liaison with Annette and the birth of her daughter, together with the consequent modifications he feels constrained to make in some of the statements in his book. These modifications refer mainly to the account of the Descriptive

6 The Early Life of Wordsworth, 1770–1798; a Study of The Prelude, by Émile Legouis, translated by J. W. Matthews, with a Prefatory Note by Leslie Stephen. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1921 (1st edition, 1897). xvi + 480 pp. 10s. 6d. net.

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159

Sketches, the melancholy of which is now seen to be genuine. Wordsworth felt and, as he thought of Annette, had reason to feel ‘Conscience dogging close his bleeding way’. Secondly, it becomes clear that, for all his reticence, the young poet had other than political interests during his sojourn in France, and, thirdly and most important, that, as De Quincey stated, Wordsworth’s intellectual passions were founded on a ‘preternatural animal sensibility’, ‘diffused through all the animal passions (or appetites)’. There is in Wordsworth’s Prelude no ‘picture of passionate love, not because he could not paint it . . . but because he would not tell his own experiences, and also because the affections (not the passions) and the purified senses were the basis of his optimistic doctrine’.

Professor Legouis relegates the new facts about Wordsworth to an appendix because, so he tells us, he has since made fresh discoveries which he proposes to publish separately. In the Revue des Deux Mondes for April and May, 1922, he gives the results of his further investigations, and though discussion of them must be held over until the next issue of the Year’s Work, this bare reference may be useful to those interested in the matter.

In The Story of Wordsworth’s Cintra (Studies in Philology, January, 1921), Professor J. E. Wells gives the first adequate account of the genesis, the composition, and the intricate bibliography of Wordsworth’s great Tract. The article is of capital importance and quality, clearing up and stating in complete and precise detail matters unsuspected or only vaguely surmised by the previous editors Grosart, Knight, and Dicey. The most important of these is the detection of the passage, occupying about two columns of the London Courier, contributed by Coleridge to his friend’s work (as stated by him to Poole, letter, February 3, 1809). It begins on p. 126, l. 10, and ends at p. 131 of Knight’s edition. It is one of the finest examples of Coleridge’s unequal prose. The occasion for it was the loss of several sheets in the London printing-office in the previous December. As related by Coleridge in a letter to the editor, ‘William received your letter’ this morning at eleven o’clock. We have been hard at work ever since. It is now nearly three

160

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in the morning. However, the Essay has probably benefited by

the accident. At all events it has been increased in size.’. This

‘increase in size’ was, precisely, as is now shown, the effect of

Coleridge’s contribution. Further complications, here also for

the first time unravelled, were introduced by the commission

given to De Quincey, then, at twenty-four, on intimate terms

with the Wordsworth family, to supervise the printing of the

Tract in its later stages, in view of the impracticable Grasmere

postal service. This third person in the little drama—a tragi-

comedy—appears to have supplemented Wordsworth’s defective

punctuation by an original system of his own and otherwise

given the nascent Tract the benefit of a mind amusingly

characterized by Coleridge as ‘anxious yet dilatory, confused

from over-accuracy, and at once systematic and labyrinthine’.

The most important event in this chapter of the story was the

sending of a long passage, on March 25, owing to a change in

the public circumstances, for insertion. This passage (beginning

p. 246 in Knight’s edition) contains about one-sixth of the

entire work. It includes the grandest statement of the pas-

sionate faith in national freedom which inspired the Tract and

which led Dicey to reprint it at the opening of the Great War.

The article closes with a minute tabulation of the variations in

the extant copies of the text.

In his essay on Sentimental Morality in Wordsworth’s

Narrative Poetry (University of Wisconsin Studies in Language

and Literature, No. 11), Mr. O. J. Campbell studies with much

penetration the purpose of the usually tragic or melancholy

themes of Wordsworth’s narratives. It has commonly been

supposed that Wordsworth means to emphasize the happiness

of unsullied nature by contrast with human misfortune and sin.

Mr. Campbell points out the evidence that Wordsworth’s animus

was rather that of the sentimental humanitarianism which he

learned from Hartley’s Observations on Man. ‘Hartley gave a

central place in his moral systems to compassion for undeserved

human suffering. He regarded it as one of the principal in-

centives to a life of joyous virtue. Wordsworth found in this

theory the highest philosophical sanction for the employment

of one of his most characteristic mental qualities. Godwin’s

contempt for pity which was awakened by human misery served

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at this time (when he had outgrown Godwin's influence) only to commend the more urgently this doctrine. . . . He therefore began to write a kind of poetry which he had not attempted before.

He retained his interest in the common man, but he no longer presented his condition as one to invite the reform of rational humanitarians. He made him the object of compassion by showing his enduring with fortitude undeserved suffering; he gave the reader authentic instances of the reformation of every human being by the sight of virtue in distress.'

This view is then applied in detail. The essay is a contribution of great value to Wordsworth-interpretation.

In Wordsworth's Interpretation of Nature (Hibbert Journal, April 1921), Dr. J. P. Lilley restates with freshness and acumen the poet's philosophy of Man, Nature, and God, affirms its consonance at all points with rational Christianity, and defends it from the charge that it is pantheistic, mythological, or otherwise either unchristian or unscientific. The 'something far more deeply interfused' of Tintern Abbey is not immanent God but ' the Soul of the World in the shape of Ideal Beauty ' (as in the Recluse Fragment) ' employed by the Creator in His ministrations to humanity '. Wordsworth's frequent references to 'Powers' and 'Spirits' receive a theological interpretation sometimes strained if not untenable.

But Dr. Lilley has the key to the whole problem of Nature's influence on Man when he quotes Goethe's Gott und Welt to the effect that 'the core of Nature is in the human heart'. 'Since man is a part of this system as well as its head, there can be no gulf between him and Nature, but rather a reciprocal activity.'

II. LANDOR

Mr. Stanley T. Williams (Publ. Mod. L. Ass. xxxvi. 4), dealing with 'the story of Gebir', makes probable that Landor's only source was Clara Reeve's 'History of Charoba, queen of Egypt', a free translation from Vattier's French version of an Arabic MS. in the Mazarin Library. On the publication of the poem, it was described by reviews as 'nothing more than a version of an Arabian Tale'. Landor on his part affirmed that it had not a sentence or a sentiment in common with the Tale.

2622 L

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Mr. Williams examines the matter in detail, and finds that neither statment is justified.

III. SCOTT

In The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott,7 Mr. Archibald Stalker attempts to deliver the really memorable man, Scott, from the incubus of the wearisome novelist and the imitation-poet. ‘Waverley’ and ‘County Guy’ and the rest are faded; but the record of their author's ‘joyous personal life’ has ‘lost not a shade of its brightness’, and has, moreover, ‘never before been told as a consecutive narrative’. The biography claims to be not only ‘new’, but specially fitted to the taste of the twentieth century, and thus unavoidably unlike the accounts which satisfied the nineteenth, though it may itself, Mr. Stalker modestly admits, be displeasing to the twenty-first. Lockhart himself was chiefly ‘a compiler’, who made his book out of Scott's letters and journals, so that that famous biography is in reality Scott's own book, and his best. The ‘twentieth century’, so far, certainly shows a pronounced taste for the personal note, and there is little in Mr. Stalker's buoyant and effusive pages of the self-suppression which, in his eyes, disqualifies Lockhart, and even Boswell, for the highest rank in biography; he significantly prefers to either the fearless candour of Mr. Pepys. For the rest, the ‘intimate life’ of Scott was certainly rich and varied enough to bear detachment, and here and there Mr. Stalker has been able to add interesting traits from sources, such as Crabb Robinson's Diary, not available for Lockhart. In successive chapters he deals with Scott's parents, his ‘first love’—hitherto slurred over, he thinks, by Scott's biographers—his ‘family life’, ‘a day at Abbotsford’, ‘Tom Purdie’, ‘Scott as a literary man’, ‘his social and political views’, ‘his personality’, and in much detail, ‘the Ballantynes and Businesses’. Mr. Stalker has the realist's eye for matters of outward fact, and finds his account in a subject so rich in them as the life of Scott. He is less remarkable either for psychological or for literary insight; and we surmise that, in

7 The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott. By Archibald Stalker. viii + 207 pp. Black. 10s. 6d. net.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800-1860 163

spite of their reticence and their preoccupation with the perish-able labours of the pen, Lockhart and even the Victorian Hutton will still be read.

IV. LAMB

It will suffice to mention that Mr. E. V. Lucas's well-known

Life of Lamb (1905)8 has appeared in a fifth edition revised.

It is 'similar to the original edition, save for the omission of

illustrations and four appendices, and the addition of certain

corrections and a few new passages'.

V. BYRON

Of Astarte, by the late Earl of Lovelace,9 originally issued

in a very small, practically private, edition in 1905, and now

published with additions by the widow of the author, a very

few words will suffice. Though pretentious and badly written,

and full of irrelevant quasi-critical matter, Astarte contained

documentary evidence, in letters both of Byron and of Mrs.

Leigh, which left no doubt of their guilt. The new edition

reproduces the original matter, slightly annotated and better

arranged, with the addition of three chapters containing

'additional letters' between Lady Byron, Mrs. Leigh, and

Mrs. Villiers, and between Mrs. Leigh and Byron, which bear

out the truth of the miserable story.

In a powerful and eloquent essay, Lord Byron,10 Arturo

Farinelli trenchantly assails the conventional fame of Byron,

still vigorously flourishing in Italy. To English readers the

book will appeal chiefly by its fresh presentation of Byron's

poetic personality as seen from this, to them relatively familiar,

angle. There are interesting side-lights—Byron as he appeared

to Goethe, Alfred de Vigny, Michelet, Mazzini, and Bismarck, and

comparisons with Leopardi and Alfieri. He traverses Byron's

claim to be a liberator in these terms: 'Can he lead men to true

8 The Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. Methuen. 2 vols. 960 pp.

21s. net.

9 Astarte. A Fragment of Truth concerning George Gordon Byron, Sixth

Lord Byron. Recorded by his grandson, Ralphe Milbanke, Earl of Lovelace.

New edition by Mary, Countess of Lovelace. Christophers. xxix + 363 pp.

18s. net.

10 Arturo Farinelli. Lord Byron. Saggio. Milano: Caddeo. 87 pp. 4 lire.

L 2

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liberty, this British lord, self-absorbed, a perpetual prey to the

most vehement passions, without firm convictions, without a

beacon-light to shine before him, or a message to accomplish?

Is not the rushing vehemence, which he had in common with

Alfieri, confused with the love and humanity that glow in

strong and constant spirits, who can radiate this their inner

fire, and awaken the slumbering energies in the lowly, so that

their chains fall from them, and the oppressed soul rise to the

light and the sun?? The distinction is just and finely put. But

a subtler criticism would admit qualifications even here. Signior

Farinelli's drawing is too deficient in light and shade to do full

justice to a personality so intricately and elusively mingled as

Byron's.

VI. SHELLEY

In his lecture, Shelley and Calderón, since published in a

volume with other essays,11 Señor Salvador de Madariaga,

a Spaniard settled in England, has given the first illuminating

discussion of the significance for Shelley of his acquaintance

with the work of the Spanish dramatist, the object, as we know,

of his ardent study and almost boundless admiration from the

summer of 1819 to the end. After quoting the familiar passages

bearing on this from Shelley's correspondence and Mary's

journals, Mr. Madariaga deals in a very fresh and interesting

way with the apparent paradox of his devotion to dramas

permeated by an inflexible Catholic orthodoxy, and not chiefly

to those among them which, like the Alcalde de Zalamea, have

a kind of democratic appeal, but to the mystic and sacramental

Autos, the whole series of which he read again and again.

The Spanish critic finds a bond of union in the passionate

dogmatism of both poets. 'Both . . . saw man, not on the moving

screen of time, but against the immovable background of

eternity.' In both, imagination, accordingly, 'tends to soar

away from the earth and to keep immaculate a dazzling white-

ness of intellectual light'. They love weird and fantastic

scenery, 'rocks, crags, and precipices'-as in the 'melancholy

mountain' passage in The Cenci, borrowed from El Magico

11 Shelley and Calderón, and other essays on English and Spanish poetry.

By Salvador de Madariaga. Constable. 197 pp. 15s. net.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800-1860

165

Prodigioso when Shelley had scarcely studied Calderón two months. Peculiarly congenial to Shelley, as his language shows, was Calderón's sensuous yet aethereal and unearthly imagery.

'I am bathing myself in the light and odour of the flowery and starry Autos.' But Calderón's way of arranging his images, in symmetrical groups followed by a kind of climax in which they are summarily resumed, is definitely un-English and un-Shelleyan.

Mr. Madariaga's most original and valuable point is that Shelley, nevertheless, felt the charm of this symmetrical mode of lyric, and in one of his own greatest lyrics, The Ode to the West Wind, frankly adopted it.

The plan of the first four stanzas is purely Calderónesque. The essay contains much other scattered observation of value about Shelley, with some, rather less penetrating, about Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold.

It may suffice to refer to the closing essay in the volume—The Case of Wordsworth, a very lively and piquant, but not really judicial, examination of Wordsworth's claims to be a great poet.

In a useful article (P.M.L.A. xxxvi. 3) Mr. Newman I. White shows that Shelley's burlesque drama, Swell-foot the Tyrant, stands in a closer relation to contemporary English satire on the same subject than had yet been established.

Some of these sources are ignored by all Shelley's commentators, and Dowden did not perceive their full bearing.

Mr. White adduces and quotes examples of the savage (but merited) satires and pamphlets directed during 1820 against the husband of Queen Caroline, and shows that Shelley borrowed largely from these anonymous productions in both manner and ideas.

Definite originals are also established for four of the persons in the play—Mammon, the Leech, the Gadfly, and the Rat, who stand respectively for Lord Liverpool, Vice-Chancellor Leach, William Cooke, a lawyer, and Lt.-Colonel Browne, a shady agent of the King, often dubbed the 'Brown rat'.

In an article on Shelley and the Abbé Barruel (P.M.L.A. xxxvi. 3), Mr. W. E. Peck throws light upon Shelley's use of a little-known book, by the Abbé, which he is known from his correspondence to have read, in an English translation.

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was the Abbé's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobitisme,

a bitter and prejudiced account of the men and ideas of the

Revolution, with abundant illustrative excerpts from Voltaire,

Rousseau, Weishaupt, and others. Shelley, while denouncing

the Abbé's 'falsehoods', eagerly read the excerpts in the

formative period which preceded Queen Mab, and Mr. Peck

traces the effect of some of them in that and later works. The

account (in vol. ii) of the Zoroastrian system was perhaps the

source of the knowledge of it, surprising at that date, displayed

in the Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's copy of Barruel, with his

autograph, dated 1810, apparently remained at Field Place and

passed into the possession of his father's neighbour, William

Sandham, a descendant of whom described it in Notes and

Queries, 10th February, 1917.

VII. KEATS

The John Keats Memorial Volume,12 published on the cen-

tenary of the poet's death, 23rd Feb. 1921, consists of about a

hundred contributions of very unequal character and impor-

tance. It opens with Professor E. de Selincourt's Warton Lecture

on Keats, an eloquent restatement of the ideas unfolded in the

Introduction to his well-known edition of the Poems. Nearly

one-fourth are from the continent, or the East, including éloges

or verse translations in Sanskrit, Persian, and several Indian

dialects, by enthusiastic native scholars. Only one of these,

gratifying as they are, has any definite bearing on English

studies-a note by Professor Hoops of Heidelberg, pointing out

the resemblance of the opening lines of Endymion to Bacon's

ideal in the Essay on Gardens, of a garden devised for all the

months of the year, 'in which severally things of beauty may be

then in season'.

The English contributions include a number of verse-tributes,

the frequent merit (and occasional almost incredible demerit) of

which is not relevant to the present purpose. To the same

category may be assigned the glowing prose of General Ian

Hamilton-a cry of noble passion with no bearing (unless for

its moving and eloquent pathos) on English studies, and very

12 The John Keats Memorial Volume, issued by the Keats House Committee

Hampstead. John Lane. 276 pp.

little on Keats. The pieces which here come into question may be distinguished according as they relate (1) to the text, (2) to the exegesis of particular poems, or (3) to particular aspects of the poetry or the life.

(1) First in interest of these is the Letter, hitherto unknown, written by Keats to Woodhouse, 22nd Sept. 1819, and enclosing the Ode to Autumn, then just composed. The present owner, the poet Miss Amy Lowell, bought it twenty years ago in a bound volume of Keats's Letters. It is a long letter, in the writer's most whimsical vein for the most part, but containing, besides the Autumn, and fragments from Hyperion, then on the stocks, incidental criticisms of Isabella, St. Agnes' Eve, and Lamia. Of greater intrinsic interest is Sir Sidney Colvin's account of the autograph MS. of the Nightingale Ode, discovered early in the present century and now in the possession of the Marquess of Crewe (A Morning's Work in a Hampstead Garden). Minute scrutiny of the paper and the writing discloses slight inaccuracies in Brown's well-known narrative, and quite disposes of Haydon's assertion that Keats recited the Ode to him 'before it was committed to paper', the MS. (here photographically reproduced) showing that its final form was reached by way of numerous and important corrections. Sir Sidney's discussion of them, and of the diverse working of Keats's poetic mind which they disclose, is full of delicate observation.

(2) The most important exegetical essays deal with the still fluid problems involved in the revised Hyperion. Mr. L. Abercrombie gives greater precision to the thesis, generally accepted, that the original Hyperion was abandoned for reasons more fundamental than dissatisfaction with its 'Miltonic inversions'; that the second Hyperion was an attempt to find poetic expression not merely, as hitherto, for the poet of impassioned senses and enchanted fantasy, but for the man of deep sympathies, keen intellect, and shrewd humour, revealed in the Letters; the third phase of the progress through the 'Vale of Soul-making' described in the famous Letter XCII. 'His art was on the verge of becoming adequate to the man.' Professor Ker in a brief pregnant note seeks a more purely technical solution for the Hyperion problem, and would explain the abandonment of Hyperion by the inherent inadequacy of his epic plan for a repre-

168 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1800–1860

sentation of Apollo in his glory. ‘In this vision, if he had gone

further he might have told more, through an interpreter, of the

new glories which he could not bring directly and fully into his

epic poem.’ But would not epic precedent have permitted his

‘Interpreter’ to relate, like Raphael or Odysseus, what could

not be directly told ?

In his Note on the Composition of Endymion Mr. Mackail

applies the known data of Keats's journeys and residences

during the summer and autumn of 1818—Carisbrook, Margate,

Canterbury, Oxford, Hampstead—to the discovery of ‘sources’

or suggestions of descriptive passages in the poem. That the

lawns and ‘copse-clad valleys’ of the Isle of Wight have counted

for something is clear; it is perhaps more noteworthy that

Canterbury and Oxford have counted for nothing at all. At

Oxford, as the letters written thence show, some unexplained

irritant neutralized the natural magic of the place; that Canter-

bury had after all left a deep impress appeared two years later

in the Eve of St. Mark's.

Dr. Boas studies the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's

Homer, suggesting reminiscences of his first reading of it in the

imagery of the sonnet himself.

(3) Among the essays on special aspects of Keats as a whole

must be mentioned Dr. A. C. Bradley's study of Keats and

‘Philosophy’. That his attitude to something which he calls

by that name presents a problem is clear when we compare

Lamia with the eagerness for ‘metaphysic’ apparent in his

Letters; that his own gift (however unschooled) for philosophic

thinking was by no means contemptible, the Letters make

equally clear. Dr. Bradley presents afresh, with further develop-

ments, his view (Oxford Lectures: ‘The Letters of Keats’) that

Keats held from first to last his central affirmation that ‘Beauty

is Truth, Truth Beauty’, and that the intellectual change marked

by the summer of 1818 and more explicitly by the second

Hyperion meant not, as has been thought, a diminished accept-

ance of Beauty, but the recognition, in pain and evil, of a deeper,

more ‘difficult’ beauty, for which it was the unfulfilled object

of his later poetry to find adequate expression. Incidentally

a traditional printer's error in the Letter to Reynolds (love for

lore) receives certain correction.

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The present writer (Mountain-Scenery in Keats), connecting the poet's first experience of 'grand' mountains in the summer of 1818 with the mental and spiritual development which followed, shows that in the den of the ruined Titans in Hyperion the Miltonic reminiscences otherwise to be expected have been replaced by the chasms of Ben Nevis.

Mr. Bailey (The Poet of Stillness) comments on the many passages where, as in the opening of Hyperion and of the Grecian Urn, 'quietness' is expressed with a magical intensity; connecting them with 'the passive, listening, watching, receiving attitude towards Nature' from which he meant to rise, and in vision though not in performance had finally risen, into the presence of the agonies and strifes of human hearts.

Personal reminiscences, finally, of Keats, through friends or relatives, are communicated by Mrs. Meynell, Mr. A. Howe, and Mr. Trevor Leigh Hunt.

The problem of the final phase of Keats, which engaged several contributors to the Memorial Volume, was handled with great penetration from a somewhat fresh point of view by Mr. G. R. Elliott, in The Real Tragedy of Keats (P.M.L.A. xxxvi, 3). Mr. Elliott's datum is the crisis in Keats's development produced by his endeavour to remould his poetry to the meaning of the larger and more philosophic apprehension of life which from 1818 had been rapidly ripening in him. The revised Hyperion, which resulted, did not, as poetry, justify the attempt. Most critics ascribe its failure to the combined operation of disease and morbid passion. Mr. Elliott thinks that the cause lay deeper. The richness of his nature impelled him to seek a synthesis in which poetry and philosophy and his fuller vision of human life would all have adequate scope and expression. But he was too heavily handicapped by circumstances-'the inadequacy of his associates, the superficiality of his understanding of the English classics, his ignorance of foreign thought'-ever to have achieved that synthesis. 'He craved without knowing it a philosophy of Goethean quality; a view of life which, while meeting nineteenth-century conditions, would be so complete and satisfying as to be fully soluble in serene beauty.' That his nature swiftly developed needs far larger

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than his powers could fulfil was thus 'the real tragedy' of

Keats. The question, so put, is speculative, and we think it

overbold to assume that the untaught thinker who shaped with

such penetrating force and expressed with such lyric beauty

a philosophic world view of his own, in the famous Letter XCII

and elsewhere, would have finally failed to find a poetry adequate

to his larger intellectual needs. But the inner obstacles which

embarrassed his struggle towards full poetic expression before

passion and disease finally frustrated it have never, we think,

been more clearly seized or more powerfully stated.

Professor Notcutt's The Story of Glaucus in Keats's 'Endy-

mion'13 continues a line of interpretation opened up by him

in his earlier essay on Endymion. Believing that Keats in-

tended the whole poem as an allegory of the history of poetry,

he proposes to find in the story of Glaucus in Book III a

symbolic reference to the rise of the Augustan classical school at

the opening of the eighteenth century. Keats has diverged from

Ovid's story of Glaucus (Metamorph. xiii-xiv) in several points,

in order, it is suggested, to adapt it to this meaning. Glaucus,

in Ovid, rejects the advances of Circe, who revenges herself

by deforming his mistress Scylla. Keats, however, meant

Glaucus to stand for the poetic impulse in England at the

outset of the age of Pope, and Scylla for a poetical idea, beautiful

in itself, but ineffective at that time; Circe is the malign

force of the school of Pope denounced in 'Sleep and Poetry',

intervening to flings Scylla in a trance. Circe,

for Mr. Notcutt, actually stands for Pope, and the picture of

the enchantress among her tusker or stinging victims is inter-

preted of the poet of the Dunciad and his throng of 'Dunces'.

Pope had himself, in the Bathos, it is pointed out, classified the

Dunces under animal types. Glaucus's later account (v. 645 f.)

of the wreck, and the old man's scroll which, torn in pieces,

Endymion flings into the face of Glaucus with enchanting effect,

is interpreted of the revival of poetry by the agency of Percy's

Reliques. In all this there is much ingenuity, though not enough

to avoid some severe straining of resemblances; but we think

13 The Story of Glaucus in Keats's 'Endymion'. By H. C. Notcutt. (Privately

printed). 20 pp.

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Mr. Notcutt, while rightly holding that the story of Glaucus is to be understood, like that of Endymion, in terms of the adventures of the poetic soul, does injustice to the imaginative reach of the poem by restricting the application to the events of a particular historic period.

Among minor contributions of interest to the constructive criticism of Keats may be mentioned Miss M. H. Shackford's article (P. M. L. A. xxxvi. 1) on The Eve of St. Agnes and The Mysteries of Udolpho. That Keats knew Mrs. Radcliffe's books, and held them in slight respect, is plain from a jesting letter to Reynolds: but the framework of the St. Agnes narrative is in many points of the Radcliffian brand, and eight passages are quoted which suggest, or do not exclude, conscious reminiscence; in particular, the chapel, the feeble old servant, the tortuous passages through the castle, the chamber with painted window and moonlight, the lover's pleading, and the hurried flight. It may be added that the gross turn to the story given in Boccaccio's Filocolo (claimed as 'the source of The Eve of St. Agnes', by McCracken in Mod. Philology v) is equally absent from Mrs. Radcliffe's romance and from Keats's poem.

Dr. Burden-Sanderson's interesting Keats Anthology may also be recorded among the Centenary Tributes.

VIII. CLARE.

To a contemporary in humbler spheres both of life and of poetry, John Clare, tardy justice has now been done in the exemplary edition of his poems14 by Mr. Edmund Blunden and Mr. A. Porter. Both editors, in addition to the scholarship and care required in dealing with MS. material, have the rarer qualification of a gift of original verse akin in temper and preoccupation to Clare's own. A large amount of hitherto unedited material is included, and an illuminating introduction prefixed.

14 The Poems of John Clare, chiefly from MSS. Edited by E. Blunden and A. Porter. John Lane.

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IX. CARLYLE

Mr. Augustus Ralli's Guide to Carlyle 15 is modestly named, and runs some risk of slighting treatment because it supplements biography and criticism with detailed analyses of the whole of Carlyle's writings. But the book was originally undertaken, we are told, as a critical study, and the inclusion of methodical analyses was a later development. Mr. Ralli recognizes the inner continuity of Carlyle's thought, and his object is to make this easier for the readers of a generation in which he is apt to be a fading ‘Victorian’ memory, to disentangle the bewildering multiplicity of his thirty volumes of ‘silence’. Mr. Ralli's ‘Guide’ is thus a critical biography ranking in importance, we consider, with the best that have yet been produced, and presenting in far larger measure than any other the data of its conclusions. The analyses are so full (that of Frederick, for instance, alone occupying some 170 pages), and so competent, that any serious quarrel with them must take the form of a suspicion that the use of this excellently distilled essence of Carlyle may replace study of the original. But so much of the original reappears in the ‘essence’, that the suspicion is in great part disarmed.

M. Jean-Marie Carré's Goethe en Angleterre 16 (a choice of subject for which he apologizes, very unnecessarily, to his countrymen) handles this important matter for the first time, we believe, with proximate completeness. He has chosen, however, to close the inquiry with Lewes's Life in 1855, merely sketching the important later example of Matthew Arnold, the most Goethcan of all great English poets. In the story thus limited, Carlyle is the towering figure, and he occupies the entire second part of the three which compose the book. The pre-Carlylean influence, patiently recorded and interpreted, has little lasting importance. Before Byron and Shelley it was entangled with the damaging sentimentalisms of ‘the German drama’ and ‘Tales of Terror’; Scott did not distinguish Erlkönig from the productions of Monk Lewis, Lamb took Faust for a ‘canting tale of seduction’. The Goethcan influence upon Byron—made light

15 A Guide to Carlyle. By Augustus Ralli. 2 vols. Allen & Unwin. 42s.

16 Goethe en Angleterre. Par J.-M. Carré. Paris: Plon. 300 pp. 15 fr.

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173

of by himself—is defined: Harold ‘is not a son of Werther, but

Manfred and Cain are kinsmen of Faust’, and however inferior

in epic and philosophic power ‘the poem of the Universe’ be

to ‘the poem of the ego’, yet, as a character, Manfred is ‘more

living, pathetic, and heroic’ than Faust. The five chapters

devoted to Carlyle distinguish carefully his attitude to Goethe

during the phases of his own growth, from the first article on

Faust, in the pessimist days of the Leith-walk episode (1822),

and the translation of Meister, to the essays, and Sartor, and the

Heroes. That Carlyle incompletely apprehended Goethe, and

his development, and that he was himself powerfully drawn

only to the ethical thinker, is clearly shown. And even this

Goethe gives place, step by step, to Fichte, whose glorified moral

will was, in truth, more Carlylean than the older master’s

Olympian vision. It struck home to the primitive Puritan

in him. ‘Goethe saved Carlyle, but Carlyle, when saved,

abandoned Goethe.’

The third part describes, not without merited sarcasm, the

prolonged discreditable incapacity of English criticism either to

grasp the plan and significance of Faust or to escape its fasci-

nation. Paracelsus, Festus, and Dipsychus are admirably dis-

cussed under this head. Less familiar are the indications of

the influence of Meister upon Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli. The

closing pages emphasize the cosmopolitan and international

significance of Goethe for the modern world, including M. Carré’s

own country. ‘Goethe is our ally, not our enemy.’ The question,

not so easily answered in M. Carré’s sense, is rather whether France

is the ally, or the enemy, of Goethe. His book may do some-

thing, in time, to persuade her of the former alternative.

X. TENNYSON

In his monograph on The Formation of Tennyson’s style17

(University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature,

No. 12), Professor J. F. A Pyre has applied the statistical

methods of literary analysis in vogue in America to a matter

where, if ever, they are in place. The stylistic secrets of an

17 The Formation of Tennyson’s Style, A Study primarily of the Versifica-

tion of the early Poems. Madison, 1921. 249 pp.

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artist who calculates may be surprised by a calculating critic; and Tennyson is not only the nearest to us of the scanty band of deliberate and conscious artists among English poets, but unlike his two chief fellows, Milton and Gray, he has left ample and most illuminating material for critical study. Mr. Pyre has limited his field, in the main, first to versification, and then to the 'early poems'; the weight of the argument being given, rightly, to the study of the crucial process which converted the pregnant imperfection of 1830 and 1833 into the finished maturity of 1842. Much of this comparison has of course been done, by Churton Collins and others; but Mr. Pyre brings a new refinement and also a new precision into it. And in the excellent chapter called 'Mastering Blank Verse', he throws important light upon the processes by which Tennyson arrived at the noble epic music of Morte d'Arthur and Ulysses.

XI. A. BRONTË

Mr. Shorter's collection of The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë18 makes for the first time generally accessible all her known pieces. Of the total of fifty-four, twenty-four only were published by Anne herself. Charlotte chose seven more, after her death, for publication in a new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. The remaining twenty-three have for the most part appeared in limited editions only and are now reprinted for the first time. Mr. Hatfield supplies a brief 'bibliographical introduction' noticing the bearing of several of them upon her brief romance, cut short by the death of its object, the curate Weightman, and giving a minutely specific account of the publications in which the fifty-four poems severally appeared.

18 The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë. Edited by Clement Shorter, now for the first time collected, with a bibliographical Introduction by C. W. Hatfield. Hodder & Stoughton. xxiii + 153 pp. 12s. 6d.

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II

1860-1900

[By H. V. Routh]

The literature of the late Victorian era is becoming sufficiently distant to assume a new and more permanent interest. But this growing attractiveness is not solely due to the rather qualified charm of increasing age. The more we are able to look back into the last forty years of the nineteenth century, the more we realize that the transition from that age to the twentieth century has not been all of a piece. As regards politics, society, economics, morals and savoir-vivre, we may consider all those to belong to the New Generation, who were not old enough to take an intelligent interest in the South African War. At the same time we are beginning to understand how far the ideas and ideals which inspire contemporary literature were already fermenting in this earlier age from which we feel that we have broken away. Thus the books of the two preceding generations are gradually being discovered anew, and future students of our own time will probably recognize an unbroken sequence of development from the reign of Victoria to the reign of George V or perhaps further.

For instance, the novels of Thomas Hardy are still a source of living interest to all readers and are of direct inspiration to some novelists. So it is gratifying that Mr. H. C. Duffin has brought out a second edition of Thomas Hardy: a Study of the Wessex Novels,1 with the chapter entitled ‘Development ’ happily omitted and an appendix on the poems and on The Dynasts added. The essay does not claim to revolutionize our ideas of the novelist.

1 Thomas Hardy : a Study of the Wessex Novels. By H. C. Duffin. Longmans, Green & Co. 7s. 6d.

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The critic gives much the picture of Hardy's thought, sentiment, and style that one would expect from a well-trained student; in fact his whole manner and view are slightly tinged by the academic tendency to discover in his author some subtle and rarified excellence which would otherwise escape the uninitiated. Besides, his style, though it tends to mellow as the work proceeds, continues to be fatiguingly egoistic and many little incon- tinences of thought from time to time irritate the reader. Yet the book is a distinct contribution to the subject. Mr. Duffin has a stimulating and suggestive way of illustrating Hardy by comparison with dramatists and poets of other ages and countries, and, if his judgement is sometimes immature and his method of praise undiscerning, he certainly has the power of kindling enthusiasm. Perhaps the most valuable feature of his book will be found in the vivid and penetrating descriptions which bring back certain of the novels so powerfully to the reader's mind, or send him to them afresh. If it is the business of a critic to reproduce the impression which an author makes upon him, so that others may catch fire from his heat, Mr. Duffin's book is well worth reading.

Another of the powers of our time is Samuel Butler. The steady growth of his influence from almost complete obscurity probably illustrates (though it does not cause) important and far-reaching changes in the ideas of the twentieth century. Mr. Festing Jones, who did so much to establish that personality in 'Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon', has during the last year, in collaboration with Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, supplemented this monumental work with The Samuel Butler Collection at St. John's College, Cambridge,2 a catalogue of the philosopher's books, pictures, and personal effects, accompanied by a commen- tary full of quaint and rather illuminating anecdotes. Mr. Gosse has also included an article on Butler in Aspects and Impressions (to be noticed lower), but the most challenging and readable discussion appears in the preface to Back to Methuselah.3 The

2 The Samuel Butler Collection at St. John's College, Cambridge: A Catalogue and a Commentary. By Henry Festing Jones and A. T. Bartholomew. Heffer & Sons, Cambridge. 7s. 6d.

3 Back to Methuselah. A Metabiological Pentateuch. By Bernard Shaw. Constable & Co. 10s.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900

177

publication of what Mr. Shaw calls a 'Metabiological Pentateuch', and which is really half a dialogue and half a dramatized legend concerning 'creative evolution', would hardly be expected to offer much guidance to students of late Victorian literature. But Darwin has had so much influence on the thought of that time and the reaction from Darwinism is so much a moving force of our own age, that a review of the conflict is, in any case, of more than scientific interest, and is of direct importance, because of the light which it throws on Butler's position. Mr. Shaw argues, in his Preface, that the doctrine of changing and adaptable species had been inculcated by Empedocles, Buffon, Linnaeus, Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, Treviranus, and by Lamarck. But the conviction had always prevailed that these changes and adaptations had proceeded according to some design and purpose. There was mind behind evolution. Darwin produced an alternative explanation. He argued that species originated by natural selection, that is, by accidental circumstances which enabled some types to survive and left others to perish. We need not dwell on the brilliant and whimsical pages describing the effect of this new doctrine. According to Mr. Shaw, the theory was eagerly embraced because it saved mankind from 'the pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path', and 'we were intellectually intoxicated with the idea that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skill, or intelligence : in short without life'. As a result, mind was banished from the universe; no place was left for free-will and for self-control; and 'though the false idea of God was destroyed, the True God was destroyed as well'. Thus the biological and evolutionary theories of the mid and late Victorian eras have produced 'the godless welter of the infidel half century'. But, like every other poison, Darwinism has provoked a reaction, and Mr. Shaw, whatever one may think of his other contentions, certainly does justice to the part which Butler played in denying that the Universe is without soul and that evolution is the result of blind, mechanical forces. Butler, Mr. Shaw continues, always insisted that vitality or the life-force was the real principle of adaptation to environment, but he never established this conviction. He attacked Neo-Darwinism, but put nothing into its place. Mr. Shaw then goes on to explain that Back to Methuselah is an

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attempt to supply this defect. His aim is to establish the new

religion of the creative life-force in the place of Darwinism, and

he contends that, as in the case of all other religions, his end can

be achieved only through the means of art. He is carrying on

the work of Samuel Butler, but he must hark back to the old

anthropomorphic beliefs and teach the truth by allegories and

legends.

Samuel Butler and his opposition to Darwinism also inspire

what are perhaps the most interesting pages of the eleventh

series of Shelburne Essays.4 In broad outline Mr. More’s view of

the conflict is very similar to Mr. Shaw’s, but when he turns to

discuss the two ‘Erewhons’, he breaks fresh ground. He is

particularly good on ‘The Book of the Machines’. He shows

how these three chapters (Erewhon xxiii-v) are part irony, part

analogy, and part a recantation. Butler was at first so impressed

by the plausible simplicity of the doctrine of natural selection

that he began by believing machinery to have an independent

racial existence. One day (he thought) it would surpass man in

development and would threaten to exterminate him. But later

the philosopher formed the opinion (as he explained in Luci-

bratio Ebria) that machines are only an extension of man’s

limbs—an elaboration of the tools which the mind invents in its

progress towards a higher organization. As such they are the

measure of inward growth and are not to be feared. These two

apparently conflicting views, the one an analogy, the other its

refutation, and both an ebullition of irony, were combined into

‘The Book of the Machines’ and the romance formed round

them. But the second view was the one which he ultimately

held. It contained the germ of his belief in ‘the will to evolve’

and grew into his teleological theory of evolution, which he ex-

pounded in Life and Habit (1877).

The other essays of A New England Group are not so in-

teresting. However, Mr. More throws some light on Emerson’s

philosophy. Emerson, he admits, recognized the double nature

of experience, but yet he does not seem to have accepted more

than one single unalterable reality: the presence and inspiration

4 A New England Group and Others, by Paul Elmore More. Constable &

Co. 8s.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900 179

of God. Emerson ignored what most of us would regard as the other reality, the activity of sin. He seems to have regarded evil as an evasive and unsubstantial impression, a kind of illusion, which did not penetrate to man's inner consciousness. Mr. More then goes on to treat us to an amusing account of what happened when Bronson Alcott endeavoured to put this theory into practice at 'Fruitlands'. The chapters on Charles Norton and on Economic Ideals are worth perusing, and those who concern themselves with the oldest English University should read the searching and rather ironical inquiry in Oxford, Women, and God. There are suggestive ideas scattered through the pages of these and the other essays, but the greater part of the book goes no further than literary gossip and cultured reminiscences concerned with picturesque and minor figures.

Other Americans have published books on modern literature. Mr. Carl Van Doren in The American Novel5 traces its origin from the earliest days of the Puritan opposition, through the embryonic stages of the frontier tales, and the initiation of the 'dime' novel by Beadle and Adams of New York, down to our own day. He tells how the domestic sentimentalists, whose best work is still accessible in Uncle Tom's Cabin, held the field till the publication of General Wallace's Ben Hur in 1880. He gives a highly appreciative account of W. D. Howells' talents and many activities, without losing sight of his limitations. He takes the opportunity to explain how, after the Civil War, America felt that she ought to have a national epic, not in the antiquated style, but some great imaginative composition which would express her rapid development and manifold pursuits. Mr. Van Doren realizes how nearly Mark Twain rose to the great occasion in Life on the Mississippi (1883), and how buoyantly he still responded to the pulse of national life when he composed his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1885). But his natural genius and vitality led him into other less glorious fields. Finn developed into a rollicking study of boy character, and in later life, after many speculations and financial adventures, its author gave way to the moodiness and disillusionment which found full

5 The American Novel. By Carl Van Doren. The Macmillan Company, New York.

M 2

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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860–1900

expression in The Mysterious Stranger. The historian passes on

to the work of Henry James, and gives a very readable account

of his career, tracing the phases of the novelist's development

and drawing attention to James's struggle for a wider public

recognition. 'But it is to be doubted whether Mr. Van Doren

fully appreciates the psychological insight of his later novels.

In the limited space of the present survey it is impossible to give

an idea of the field which Mr. Van Doren covers. He considers

the eighties to be the period of greatest quantity and of finest

quality, and he takes Marion Crawford as the representative* of

its defects and excellences. But the work of Howells and of

James mark 'the most refined, and on the whole, the most

artistic moment in the history of the American novel'. There

then followed two reactions: on the one hand a tendency

towards historical romance, and on the other hand an insistence

on realism. The romances are characterized by pseudo-archaic

phraseology and by genteel sentiments, such as are found in

S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. The movement towards realism

is more interesting, even if not always more successful. A feel-

ing had gained force in America that the novel ought to be

a powerful agent in the progress of civilization, and that it could

most effectively fulfil this function by exposing and condemning

every practice that thwarted progress. So novelists began to

cultivate 'naturalism'. The most brilliant exponent of this

school was Frank Norris (1870-1902), not only because he

exposed all the passions and vices aroused by the business of

producing and distributing the vast food supplies of the West,

but because he caught something of the epic spirit of the States

and portrayed in his eloquent if somewhat turgid pages the pro-

founder though less lovely instincts of human nature. Had the

author of The Octopus and The Pit lived to reach maturity,

America might at last have found a national voice.

Thus The American Novel is a distinct contribution to the

subject. The work is particularly welcome because the author

dwells so insistently on the idea of development. He avoids

the academic error of ascribing too much importance to English in-

fluence and, at the same time, he escapes the popular weakness

of magnifying his own country's achievement. He realizes that

the American novel is a product of American civilization, but

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900 181

that neither of them has yet found its true path. One can only wish that he had discussed with more insight that essentially American institution, the short story. Strictly speaking, a volume of tales ought not to be classed as a novel, but our idea of transatlantic fiction would have been more complete.

While Mr. Van Doren has confined himself severely to his own country, Professor W. L. Phelps has brought out a volume on the dramatists of England, America, Belgium, and France. Essays on Modern Dramatists 6 is written in a racy conversational style, stamped with the author's personality. The book is not only readable; it is stimulating, because the author puts so much enthusiasm into his judgements and justifies his admiration with such vivid descriptions and persuasive arguments. Yet one cannot help feeling that this appreciative play-goer will meet with as many dissenters as disciples. He thinks that Sir James Barrie ‘has done more to elevate the English stage than any other man of our time’, and he claims that Sir James's masterpiece is The Admirable Crichton, and is ‘the greatest English drama of modern times’. But when in the next essay he turns to Mr. Shaw, he does not trouble to discuss the Shavian comedies. He considers the quality of his mind without exploring its contents, and concludes that the dramatist is so compact of clear reason and so purged of romance that he is to be read, not for his art or his ideas, but only as a stimulant to thought. Professor Phelps's sympathetic study of Galsworthy deals with a dramatist outside the limits of this article, but in his third essay on W. Clyde Fitch he gives a delightful sketch of the American's personality and of his struggle to fame, and declares Beau Brummell (1890) to be the beginning of the modern American drama. Yet when we read on to learn what the playwright has really achieved and contributed to his art, Professor Phelps becomes elusive, and we are forced to the conclusion that even Fitch's other best plays (The Truth, The Girl with the Green Eyes, The City), though they have ideas, are eminent chiefly for lack of competitors. On the whole, the reader of these or the remaining essays will meet with more amusement than help in the study of the drama. Yet

6 Essays on Modern Dramatists. By Professor W. L. Phelps. The Macmillan Company, New York. $ 2.50.

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Professor Phelps is too shrewd a connoisseur to write a whole book

on his favourite subject without dropping some valuable hints.

The student will do well to meditate on his reminder that the

most unpopular and commercially unsuccessful dramatists some-

times exercise most influence on the development of the drama

and that a good fifth act is the rarest of excellences.

Yet one other of the founders of the twentieth century has

been discussed during the last year. Mr. J. Bruce Glasier, the

veteran lecturer and Socialist agitator, has devoted some of the

last days of his life to the task of recording his recollections

of William Morris.7 The book is intended as a legacy to the

Socialist movement, and may not at first sight seem to be of any

special value to a student of literature. In fact Morris's prose

and poetry are hardly mentioned—certainly not discussed—

though his religious and social convictions are expounded clearly

and enthusiastically. Yet the book is well worth reading, even

by the most exclusive of academic specialists. To begin with, the

last forty years of the nineteenth century, unlike our own age,

was a time when ideas were associated with strong personalities,

and this memoir, with its store of anecdotes, will give the reader

a good notion of a type of character which really impressed

our fathers. But there is another and deeper reason why the

record should be welcomed. Morris was an early type of the

new literary man. Unlike Tennyson, Browning, Dobell, Rossetti,

FitzGerald, and their followers, he did not make artistic expression

the object of his life. The real secret of his genius was a kind

of neo-humanism ; an enthusiam for his fellow-creatures ; a

passion for creating and sharing happiness. The triumph of

socialism, the dissemination of ideas, and the production of litera-

ture were for him only the nearest and most effective means to

this end. Although by profession a poet, romancer, artist, dyer,

printer, upholsterer, cabinet-maker, glass-designer, architect, and

agitator, he was really by nature and at heart a humanitarian

moralist. This tendency to make literature subserve comradeship

continues increasingly to influence our own generation. Authors

do not, of course, consciously inspire themselves from Morris, but

7 William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. By J.

Bruce Glasier. Longmans, Green & Co. 6s. 6d.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900 183

since the dawn of the twentieth century they seem more and

more to be taking his view of art. As Howells says of Tolstoy,

'He taught me to see life not as a chase of a for ever impossible

personal happiness, but as a field for endeavour towards the

happiness of the whole human family.' In fact, novelists are

beginning to introduce the type itself into their creations, as

witness the one charming and original character in If Winter

Comes. Mr. Glasier is at no special pains to emphasize this

aspect of his hero's career ; nor should he, as his book claims only

to describe a Socialist reformer, and in any case Morris never

aimed at creating a school. But the tendency is in our own time

unmistakable, and even in these pages Morris stands out as its

prototype.

Most of the books which have so far been discussed deal with

authors who are at this day unmistakably powers in the land.

We now come to an earnest and in some respects very able piece

of criticism, devoted to one of the most neglected of Victorian

poets. In this age of intensive study, a champion falls sooner or

later to the lot of every writer, however obscure, and Coventry

Patmore has at last found an uncompromising and whole-hearted

apologist in Mr. O. Burdett.8 Mr. Burdett finds in The Angel in

the House a new doctrine that amounts to a philosophy of life :

that the consummation of love is possible only to a lover who is

a husband and to a woman who is that lover's wife. Nay more,

this consummation is the only state in which man's natural

goodness and nobility can come to the surface and find their

scope. Those who complain that a prosaic courtship continued

in decorous married life is too homely a subject for serious litera-

ture, fail to see (Mr. Burdett argues) that herein lies Patmore's

chief claim to originality ; he has founded a system and an ideal

on a series of commonplace experiences. Those again who

complain that verse is not the proper medium with which to

expound these theories, forget that such ideas contain 'the

primary simplicities' which are the province of poetry. If The

Angel in the House contains a philosophy, The Unknown Eros

contains a religion, or at any rate the commentary on a

religion. Love-making is sometimes regarded as very human if

8 The Idea of Coventry Patmore. By O. Burdett. H. Milford. 7s. 6d.

184

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900

not humorous, and so it should be regarded, except that the relations between honourable lovers are an analogy, or rather an actual reflection of God's love for the soul.

In fact, in his prose essay Dieu et ma Dame, Patmore summarizes the familiar signs of earthly love and argues that the analogy with heavenly love becomes an identity.

After Mr. Burdett has thus set himself to show that the foregoing works present the study of a pair of lovers before and after marriage, and also illustrate their relation to both earthly and heavenly love, he turns to the hard sayings of The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, and argues that these essays really continue the same subject and portray the inner constitution of man's spirit in itself.

This interpretation is expounded with lucidity and enthusiasm, but Mr. Burdett is no mystic so absorbed in the contemplation of his author that he cannot realize the complexities and requirements of his own age.

On the contrary, he feels that the world of thought at the present time is suffering from a state of disorder because it lacks belief in some general theory, and he claims that Patmore's philosophy of life, rooted in a superrational yet familiar physical experience, will supply the guiding influence which is needed.

In so condensed a review as the present, there is no room to discuss Patmore's tenets, or even to give an opinion on Mr. Burdett's strenuous advocacy of them.

It is barely possible to put the reader in possession of his conclusions.

As a philosopher 'it was Coventry Patmore's peculiar vocation to meditate on the nature of love and to find in that mystery the clue to every problem'; as an artist 'perhaps the chief contribution of his poetry was not only to rescue modern life for the epic, but to add to the traditional and splendid music of the epic the hitherto absent cadence of a still small voice'.

If a thinker and artist of this order (whom Mr. Burdett in one connexion compares to Plato and Dante) has been neglected, it is because he ignored the claims of friendship, with which nuptial love is unquestionably at variance, because the present age distrusts marriage and because art is now prized too much as an escape from actuality.

Such are some of Mr. Burdett's views, yet the most sympathetic reader, after closing his eloquent and learned pages, will still wonder why Patmore clung so obstinately to narrative verse instead of attempting something more in the manner of Meredith's Modern Love or In Memoriam.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900

185

Besides the treatise on Patmore, several verse anthologies have appeared, but they either gather their flowers from all the periods, like Mr. John Drinkwater's The Way of Poetry 9 (whose charming little introduction should be read by every boy and girl in the English-speaking world), or else they make their selections from twentieth-century literature, like An Anthology of Recent Poetry for Schools,10 or Mr. G. N. Pocock's excellent selection in The King's Treasuries of Literature.11 But among the essays in Professor Federico Olivero's Studies in Modern Poetry,12 a collection of papers dealing for the most part with French literature, there is a rather fragmentary essay On Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. The Turin professor, in florid but surprisingly expressive English, dwells on the usual aspects of Swinburne's revolt, indicates a few imitations or parallels from Sophocles and Ovid, and asserts, without substantiating, that a tendency towards Greek art was a striking feature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He concludes that Atalanta 'does not attain the supreme heights of poetry, because it lacks " mystery ", that depth of thought and passion " which passeth show " and cannot be clearly expressed even by the greatest masters of art, but which is admirably suggested in their loftiest passages'.

The reader will also find three delightfully written essays on Victorian literature among the papers in Mr. Gosse's Aspects and Impressions.13 But as the aspect is nearly always biographical and the impression almost exclusively personal, these causeries, apart from their charming style, mainly serve as introductions or supplements to their subjects. Students will be grateful for the discussion on George Eliot's decline in popularity and for the quotation that she was 'the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief'. They will also be glad of the explanation why Samuel Butler

9 The Way of Poetry. John Drinkwater. The New World Series. Collins's Clear Type Press. 7s. 6d. net.

10 An Anthology of Recent Poetry. Compiled by L. D'O. Walters. G. Harrap & Co. 1s. 6d., &c.

11 Modern Poetry. Edited by Guy N. Pocock, M.A. Messrs. Dent. 1s. 9d.

12 Studies in Modern Poetry. By Federico Olivero. H. Milford. 7s. 6d.

13 Aspects and Impressions. By Edmund Gosse. Cassell. 7s. 6d.

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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1860-1900

so strongly disliked Vergil, Dante, Tennyson, Titian, Leonardo

Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart; and they

will be interested to trace the part played by Miss Eliza Mary

Ann Savage in The Way of All Flesh. The best essay in the

whole collection is the brilliantly written sketch of Henry

James's life, largely based on personal knowledge, which traces

with the utmost clearness and sympathy the stages by which the

novelist came at last to find his place in the scheme of things.

Would that Mr. Gosse had found space or inclination to shed

more light on James's intellectual development!

INDEX

Abercrombie, L., on Keats's Hyperion, 167.

Ainslie, Douglas, translation of Croce's Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, 71–3.

Alexander, Sir William, Earl of Stirling, Poetical Works, 90–2.

Amos, Flora Ross, Early Theories of Translation, 13–14.

Anything for a Quiet Life, 96.

Appius and Virginia, 95–6.

Aronstein, Philip, on the life and poetry of John Donne, 108.

Bailey, John, The Poet of Stillness (Keats), 169.

Baker, R. P., A History of English-Canadian Literature to the Con-federation, 11–12.

Bartholomew, A. T.: see Jones, H. F.

Bax, Clifford: see Rubinstein, H. F.

Bayne, Rev. R., transcription of the Life of Fisher (Harleian MS.), 47–8.

Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, 97–8.

Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 117.

Bēowulf, ed. R. W. Chambers, 33–5; trans. C. K. Scott–Moncrieff, 35–6.

Berdan, J. M., Early Tudor Poetry, 1485–1547, 54–8.

Birkhead, Edith, The Tale of Terror, A Study of the Gothic Romance, 139.

Birth of Merlin, The, 97.

Blake, William, 141–2.

Blore, G. H., Victorian Worthies, 156–7.

Blunden, E. and Porter, A., The Poems of John Clare, 171.

Boas, F. S., An Introduction to the Reading of Shakspere, 67–8; on Keats's sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 168.

Bradley, A. C., Keats and ‘Philosophy’, 168.

Braines, W. W., The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark, 80.

Brawley, B., A Short History of the English Drama, 11.

Brett-Smith, H. F. B., ed. Drayton's Nymphidia, 110.

Broadus, E. K., The Laureateship, a Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England, 9–11, 117–19.

Brome, Richard, 88.

Brontë, Anne, Poems, 174.

Brown, A. C. L., The Grail and the English Sir Perceval, 53.

Brown, Basil, Law Sports at Gray's Inn, 82–3.

Brown, F. K., Marlowe and Kyd, 86.

Brown, J. W., on MS. song-books compiled by Thomas Smith, 110–11.

Brown, S. J., The Realm of Poetry, 18–19.

Bryan, W. F., The Midland Present Plural Indicative ending e(n), 50–1.

Burdett, O., The Idea of Coventry Patmore, 183–4.

Burns, Robert, 143–4.

Butler, Samuel, 176–8.

Byrne, M. St. Clare, Anthony Munday and his Books, 83–4.

Byron, Lord, 163–4.

Campbell, O. J., Sentimental Morality in Wordsworth's Narrative Poetry, 160–1.

Captives, The; or, The Lost Recovered, 94–5.

Carlyle, Thomas, 151–2, 172–3.

Carré, J. M., Goethe en Angleterre, 172–3.

Cazamian, L., L'Évolution psychologique et la Littérature en Angleterre, 154–6.

Chambers, R. W., Bēowulf: an Introduction, 33–5.

Chambrun, Comtesse de, Giovanni Florio, Un Apôtre de la Renaissance en Angleterre, 60–2.

188

INDEX

Chancellor, E. Beresford, The Eighteenth Century in London: an Account of its Social Life and Arts, 147-8.

Charlemagne (The Distracted Emperor), 93-4.

Charlton, H. B.: see Kastner, L. E.

Child, Harold, 68.

Cibber, Colley, The Careless Husband, 125-6.

Clare, John, 171.

Clark, A. M., The Authorship of 'Appius and Virginia', 95-6.

Cleveland, John, 109.

Colvin, Sir S., on an autograph MS. of Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, 167.

Conway, R. S., on the classical elements in Shakespeare's Tempest, 76.

Crane, R., and Smith, R. J., A French Influence on Goldsmith's 'Citizen of the World', 137.

Crawford, S. J., ed. Exameron Anglice, or the Old English Hexameron, 40.

Croce, B., Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, 71-3.

Croll, M. W., Attic Prose in the Seventeenth Century, 113.

Crowne, John, 123-5 ; Sir Courtily Nice, 123-4.

Cruickshank, A. H., Thomas Parnell, or What was wrong with the Eighteenth Century, 137-8.

Dane, Clemence, Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts, 78-9.

Danielowski, Emma, Die Journal der frühen Quäker, 131-2.

Day, Mabel, ed. The Wheatley Manuscript, 49.

de Sélincourt, E., Warton Lecture on Keats, 166.

Dixon, M. : see Grant, W.

Dobson, Austin, Later Essays, 1917-20, 138-9.

Donne, John, 108.

Draper, J. W., Aristotelian 'Mimesis' in England, 138; The Theory of Translation in the Eighteenth Century, 138.

Drayton, Michael, Nimphidia, 110.

Drinkwater, John, The Way of Poetry, 185.

Dubislav, G., Studien zur mittelenglischen Syntax, 50.

Duffin, H. C., Thomas Hardy: a Study of the Wessex Novels, 175-6.

Eccles, F. Y., Racine in England, 123.

Edwards, Thomas, 102.

Einstein, L., Tudor Ideals, 54.

Elliott, G. R., The Real Tragedy of Keats, 169-70.

Elton, Oliver, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-80, 149-54.

Emerson, O. F., Imperfect Lines in 'Pearl' and the Rimed Parts of 'Sir Gawyn', 52. See also Whigam, R. G.

English, The Teaching of, in England: Report of the Departmental Committee of the Board of Education, 23-4.

Exameron Anglice, ed. S. J. Crawford, 40.

Falls, Cyril, on Andrew Marvell, 110.

Farinelli, Arturo, Lord Byron, 163-4.

Farrant, Richard, 81-2.

Field, Nathaniel, 97.

Finch, M. B., and Peers, E. Allison, Walpole's Relations with Voltaire, 141.

Fisher, Cardinal John, Life, 47-8.

Flatman, Thomas, 109, 110.

Florio, John, Life and Works, 60-2.

Floyer, J. K., Some Emblem Books and their Writers, 111.

Foerster, Max, Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen, 36-7.

Ford, John, 96-7.

Fraser, Sir J. G., Sir Roger de Coverley and Other Literary Pieces, 134.

Freeman, A. M., Vanessa and her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift, 128-30.

Friedlander, G., Shakespeare and the Jew, 75.

Fripp, E. I.: see Savage, R.

Funke, O., Zur Wortgeschichte der französischen Elemente in Englischen, 49.

Furnivall, F. J., ed. The Gild of St. Mary, Lichfield, 47.

Gaselee, S., Samuel Pepys' Spanish Books, 124.

Gay, John, Life and Letters, 135 ; The Beggar's Opera, 130.

Gesta Grayorum, 82.

Glasier, J. Bruce, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, 182-3.

INDEX

189

Glicksman, H., The Stage History of Colley Cibber's 'The Careless Husband', 125-6.

Goethe, 172-3.

Goffe, Thomas, Careless Shepherdess, 88.

Gollancz, Sir I., ed. Pearl, 43-4; The Middle Ages in the Lineage of English Poetry, 45-6.

Göricke, W., Das Bildnisideal bei Addison und Steele, 132-3.

Gosse, Edmund, Aspects and Impressions, 185-6.

Graham, W., Politics of the Greater Romantic Poets, 156.

Grant, W., and Dixon, M., Manual of Modern Scots, 30-2.

Graves, T. S., Notes on Puritanism and the Stage, 98-9.

Greene, Robert, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, 87.

Greg, W. W., 87, 92; The First Edition of Ben Jonson's 'Every Man out of his Humour', 87-8.

Grierson, H. J. C., Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, 113-14.

Gwynn, Nell, Elegy on, 116.

Hamilton, General Ian, 166-7.

Hanford, J. H., Milton and the Art of War, 106-7.

Hardy, Thomas, 175-6.

Harper, G. McLean, Wordsworth's French Daughter, 157-8.

Hart, Charles, the actor, 117.

Hearnshaw, F. J. C., ed. Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization, 45.

Hecht, Hans, Daniel Webb, ein Beitrag zur englischen Aesthetik des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, 130-1.

Heminge, William, On the Time-Poets, 111.

Hendrix, W. S., Quevedo, Guevara, La Sage, and The Tatler, 134.

Herford, C. H., Mountain Scenery in Keats, 169; Shakespeare's Treatment of Love and Marriage, and other Essays, 19-20.

Herrick, Robert, Poetical Works, 110.

Heusler, A., Das nordische Altertum in seiner Beziehung zum westgermanischen, 29.

Heywood, Thomas, Appius and Virginia, 95-6; The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered, 94-5.

Hickey, Emily, The Making of English Blank-Verse, 62-3.

Hillebrand, H. N., The Early History of the Chapel Royal, 63.

Hines, J. A., Further Interpretations of Milton, 105-6.

Hitchcock, Elsie V., ed. The Donet of Reginald Pecock, 48-9.

Holthausen, F., ed. Vices and Virtues, 49.

Hübener, Herr, Das Problem des Flexionsschwundes im ags, 39-40.

Hulbert, J. R., The 'West Midland' of the Romances, 51-2.

Jakobsen, J., Etymologisk Ordbog over det norrøne Sprog på Shetland, 30.

Jente, R., Die Mythologischen Ausdrücke im altenglischen Wortschatz, 37-8.

Jespersen, O., Engelsk Fonetik, 30; Language: its Nature, Development and Origin, 25-7.

Jones, H. F., and Bartholomew, A. T., The Samuel Butler Collection at St. John's College, Cambridge, 176.

Jones, R. Foster, Lewis Theobald, his Contribution to English Scholarship, 135-7.

Jonson, Ben, Catiline, 88; Every Man out of his Humour, 87-8; Prelude to the Epode in The Forrest, 88.

Judson, A. C., ed. Heywood's The Captives, 94-5.

Jusserand, J. J., English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, 46-7.

Kastner, L. E., and Charlton, H. B., ed. The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, 90-2.

Kaye, F. B., The Writings of Bernard Mandeville, 134-5.

Keats, John, 166-71.

Keats Memorial Volume, 166-9.

Ker, W. P., on Keats's Hyperion, 167.

Keynes, G., Bibliography of Blake, 142-3.

Killigrew, Thomas, The Parson's Wedding, 123-4.

King, Henry, 109.

Kyd, Thomas, 86.

Lamb, Charles, 163.

Landor, Walter Savage, 161-2.

190

INDEX

Lathrop, H. B., The Art of the Novelist, 20-1.

Lawrence, W. J., Early Substantive Masques, 98 ; The Earliest Private-Theatre Play, 81–2 ; The Riddle of 'Philaster', 97-8.

Leach, H. G., Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, 29.

Legouis, Emile, The Early Life of Wordsworth, 1770-98 ; a Study of 'The Prelude', 158-9.

Lichfield, The Guild of St. Mary at, 47.

Liljegren, S. B., Bemerkungen zur Biographie Milton's, 105 ; Studies in Milton, 103-5.

Lilley, J. P., Wordsworth's Interpretation of Nature, 161.

Lindkvist, H., On the Origin and History of the English Pronoun She, 30, 50.

Littledale, H., 92.

Lovelace, Ralph Milbanke, Earl of, ed. Mary, Countess of Lovelace, 163.

Lovelace, Richard, Poems, 111.

Lubbock, P., The Craft of Fiction, 21-3.

Lucas, E. V., The Life of Charles Lamb, 163.

Luick, K., Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, 30.

McIntyre, Clara F., Were the 'Gothic Novels' Gothic ?, 140.

Mackail, J. W., on Keats's Endymion, 168.

McLachlan, H., Letters of Theophilus Lindsey, 132.

McNaught, D., The Truth about Burns, 143-4.

Madariaga, Salvador de, Shelley and Calderón, and other Essays on English and Spanish poetry, 164-5.

Malone Society Reprints, 87-8, 92-3.

Malory, Sir T., Le Morte d'Arthur, 44-5.

Marlowe, Christopher, 84-6 ; Doctor Faustus, 84–5 ; The Jew of Malta, 85-6.

Marvell, Andrew, 110.

Melville, L., The Life and Letters of John Gay, 135.

Middleton, Thomas, 96.

Milton, John, 103-8.

Montague, Walter, The Shepheards Paradise, 89.

Moore, C. A., The Conclusion of 'Paradise Lost', 105.

Moore, S., Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English, 49-50.

Moorman, F. W., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, 110.

More, P. E., A New England Group and Others, 178-9.

Morgan, F., The Virtue of Temperance in the 'Faerie Queene', 101.

Morley, Edith J., Joseph Warton's Criticism of Pope, 137.

Morris, William, 182-3.

Moscovitch, M., 75.

Munday. Anthony, 83-4.

Mustard, W. P., 88.

Mutschmann, H., Der ander Milton, 103-5.

Neaste of Waspes, A, 109.

Newbolt, Sir H., ed. An English Anthology of Prose and Poetry, 7-8.

Notcutt, H. C., The Story of Glaucus in Keats's 'Endymion', 170-1.

Odell, G. C. D., Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 66–7.

Olivero, Frederico, Studies in Modern Poetry, 185.

Omond, T. S., A Study of Metre, 14-15 ; English Metrists, 15.

Ord, H., Chaucer and the Rival Poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets, 75.

Osborne, Dorothy, Letters, 114-15.

Palmer, H. E., The Principles of Language-Study, 27.

Parry, J. J., A Seventeenth-Century Gallery of Poets, 111.

Patmore, Coventry, 183-4.

Patton, Julia, The English Village, A Literary Study, 1750-1850, 146-7.

Paul, F.B., Milton's Samson Agonistes, 106.

Paul, H., Deutsches Wörterbuch, 30 ; Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 30. Pearl, 43-4.

Peck, W. E., Shelley and the Abbé Barruel, 165-6.

Pcock, Reginald, The Donet, 48-9.

Peers, E. Allison : see Finch, M. B.

Pepys, Samuel, Spanish collections of, 124.

Perromat, C., William Wycherley: Sa Vie—Son Œuvre, 119-22.

INDEX

Perry, Bliss, A Study of Poetry, 17-18.

Phelps, W. L., Essays on Modern Dramatists, 181-2 ; ed. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, 111.

Pocock, G. N., ed. Modern Poetry, 185.

Pollard, A. W., 70, 78.

Porter, A. : see Blunden, E.

Poston, M. L., The Origin of the Heroic Play, 126-7.

Pound, Louise, Poetic Origins and the Ballad, 15-17.

Pourtalès, Guy de, trans. Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, 76-7.

Pyre, J. F. A., The Formation of Tennyson's Style, 173-4.

Queen, The, or the Excellency of her Sex, 96.

Quiller-Couch, Sir A. T., and Wilson, J. Dover, edd. The New Shakespeare, 68-71.

Racine, J., 123.

Ralli, A., A Guide to Carlyle, 172.

Rastell, John, the printer, 64.

Ravenscroft, Edward, The London Cuckolds, 123-4.

Reed, A. W., John Rastell, Printer, Lawyer, Venturer, Dramatist, and Controversialist, 64 ; The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538, 64-5.

Reynolds, Myra, The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760, 144-6.

Rollins, H. E., A Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama, 99-100.

Rubinstein, H. F., and Bax, Clifford, Shakespeare : A Play in Five Episodes, 77-8.

Saintsbury, G., ed. Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 109-10.

Sampson, J., ed. The Poems of William Blake, 141-2.

Saurat, D., Blake and Milton, 142 ; Les Sources anglaises de la Pensée de Milton, 102-3 ; Milton et le Zohar, 102-3.

Savage, R., and Fripp, E. I., Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records 1553-1620, 79.

Schoell, F. L., Charlemagne (The Distracted Emperor), 93-4.

Scott, Sir Walter, 162-3.

Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., Bēowulf (trans.), 35-6.

Scudder, Vida D., Le Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, 44-5.

Seaton, Ethel, Marlowe and his Authorities, 86.

Shackford, Martha H., The Eve of St. Agnes, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, 140-1, 171.

Shakespeare, William, 66-80 ; Measure for Measure, French translation of, 76-7 ; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 69 ; The Tempest, 76 ; The New Shakespeare, 68-71.

Shaw, G. Bernard, Back to Methuselah : a Metabiological Pentateuch, 176-8.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 164-6.

Shirley, James, Ode upon the Happy Return of King Charles II, 116.

Shorter, C., ed. The Complete Poems of Anne Brontē, 174.

Sidney, Sir Philip, Astrophil and Stella, 101.

Simpson, P., 70 ; The 1604 Text of Marlowe's ' Doctor Faustus ', 84-5.

Sisam, K., Fourteenth-Century Verse and Prose, 41-2.

Skelton, John, 63-4.

Smart, J. S., The Sonnets of Milton, 107-8.

Smith, G. C. Moore, New Light on Dorothy Osborne's Letters, 114-15.

Smith, L. Toulmin, trans. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, 46-7.

Smith, R. J. : see Crane, R.

Smith, Thomas, two MS. song-books compiled by, 110-11.

Snell, A. R., on the allegory of Spenser's Muiopotmos, 101.

Spenser, Edmund, 101.

Spielmann, M. H., Shakespeare Treads the Boards, 77.

Stalker, A., The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott, 162-3.

Stanley, Thomas, 109.

Steadman, J. M., The Date of Winnere and Wastoure, 52.

Stopes, Mrs., biographical sketch of Thomas Edwards, 102.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of, and Other Records 1553-1620, 79.

Strong, A. T., A Short History of English Literature, 9.

192

INDEX

Summers, Montague, Restoration Comedies, 123-4.

Swift, Jonathan, correspondence with Vanessa, 128-30.

Sykes, H. D., A Webster-Middleton Play: 'Anything for a Quiet Life', 96 ; Ford's Posthumous Play, 'The Queen', 96-7; Nathaniel Field's Work in the 'Beaumont and Fletcher' Plays, 97.

Tatlock, J. S. P., The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus, 52-3.

Taylor, H. O., Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century, 58-60.

Tennyson, Lord, 152-3, 173-4.

Thaler, Alwin, 88.

Theobald, Lewis, 135-7.

Thimme, Margarete, Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta', 85-6.

Thompson, E. N. S., Mysticism in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, 111-12.

Thorn-Drury, G., A Little Ark, 88-9, 116-17.

Tolkien, J. R. R., A Middle-English Vocabulary, 42-3.

Van Doren, Carl, The American Novel, 179.

Vices and Virtues, 49.

Walters, L. D'O., ed. An Anthology of Recent Poetry for Schools, 185.

Warres of Cyrus King of Persia, against Antiochus King of Assyria, 81-2.

Webb, Daniel, 130 ; Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry, 131.

Webster, John, 96.

Weekley, E., An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 28.

Wells, J. E., The Story of Wordsworth's 'Cintra', 159-60.

Wells, W., The Birth of Merlin, 97. Welsh Ambassador, The, 92-3.

Westlake, Rev. H. F., John Skelton, 63-4.

Whigam, R. G., and Emerson, O. F., Sonnet Structure in Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella', 101.

White, A. F., John Crowne and America, 124-5.

White, Newman I., Shelley's 'Swellfoot the Tyrant', 165.

Whiting, Nathaniel, 109.

Wiener, L., Contributions towards a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture, 29-30.

Wilkinson, C. H., ed. A Neaste of Waspes, 109.

Williams, R. C., Epic Unity as discussed by Sixteenth-Century Critics in Italy, 62.

Williams, Stanley T., The Story of Landor's 'Gebir', 161-2.

Wilson, J. Dover : see Quiller-Couch, Sir A. T.

Winstanley, Lilian, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, 73-5.

Withington, R., English Pageantry : an Historical Outline, 12-13.

Wordsworth, William, 157-61.

Wycherley, William, 119-22.

Wyld, H. C., English Philology in English Universities, 27-8.

Zeitlin, J., Commonplaces in Elizabethan Life and Letters, 112-13.

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