Paradise Lost we are shown a supreme example of greatness of idea and comprehensiveness of experience focused in a personality of commanding intensity and power. In Paradise Lost Satan is the idea'; and the idea is Free-will versus Fate. This is put with great eloquence and force; but we think it simplifies both Milton and his great poem overmuch. 'Free-will', was Satan's last word, but it was not Milton's; freedom for him was liberty to obey the divine law, and the final prospect he held out to man, through Michael's parting words to Adam, was that of winning back through that obedience 'a Paradise within thee happier far'. This last word' must surely be taken up into the final significance of Paradise Lost. And it can be, without prejudice to the more overwhelming grandeur of Satan.

The fourth lecture (Tragic Greatness: The Hero') traces the bearing of 'great character' upon the 'greatness' of the poem. The Iliad is supremely great, in virtue of its structure and execution, not solely because of the grandeur of Achilles and Hector. The Dynasts, on the other hand, grand as it is, misses the supremacy which is given by towering personality, since men are by the explicit philosophy of the poem itself only the 'fingers' of universal will. And the inferiority of the Second Part of Faust is referred to the evanescence of the character of the hero. It may be unfair', as he suggests, to compare Hamlet or Macbeth, who show no disposition thus to fade in the closing Acts. But it is also, we think, misleading to make even Shakespearian tragedy, with its exclusive reference to human personalities and mundane issues, an absolute standard for tragedy like Faust, where man, whatever his spiritual significance, is confessedly a piece in the cosmic game. But in Shakespearian tragedy, too, Abercrombie, we must think, over-emphasizes the significance of the hero. His extremely fine discussions of Macbeth and Hamlet suffer from his axiom that tragedy must represent a good elicited from the evil, and matching or superior to the evil, and that we should not enjoy it were this not the case. He can thence find the essence of Macbeth in the 'white heat vigour by which he is himself against the world'. But is not the sense of waste, uncompensated waste, ultimate in these tragedies? And does this formula fit Lear, or Othello? And does not the notion of compensation, or equivalence, detract any

how from tragic quality? We cannot discuss the point further here, and we must be content to indicate the original development of the 'personality' theme in the striking final lecture. For in this last group of 'great' poems the poet himself is the hero whose personality, focusing a vast and crowded experience, pervades it. They include not only Lucretius and Dante, but Whitman, 'that vividly personal figure which is surely one of the few supremely great things in modern poetry'. We have spoken at large of this volume, and not concealed occasional demur. It is not final, but it is the brilliant work of one who is a thinker as well as a critic, and who apprehends 'great poetry' with the authentic imagination of a poet.

Mr. Richards brings to these discussions a more definitely scientific equipment. He has contributed to the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method a book of importance for all critical students of English literature, which cannot, however, be adequately appraised in an account of English Work'.2 Himself a lecturer on English literature, Mr. Richards is at the same time a trained psychologist of the 'Behaviourist' school, and his book is the ablest attempt we have yet seen to bring modern psychology methodically to bear upon the 'chaos' of existing critical theory. Literary critics have, in England, ignored or, at best, toyed with psychology; while, on the other hand, the problems of poetry and literary genius are precisely those in which professional psychology itself has made least advance. Our criticism has no accepted canon of value; in default, 'Truth', 'Beauty', and other abstractions, exercise an undefined and fruitless sway. Richards accordingly seeks a universally applicable theory of value as the first requisite of a scientific criticism. His method, roughly stated, is to substitute for all abstract or ideal standards a more exact analysis of literary experience. The method is applied with poetic insight as well as with scientific acumen, and against moral or religious claims to determine art values, as well as against art's own claims to autonomy; even Dr. Bradley's 'Poetry for Poetry's Sake', the last and ablest formulation of 'Art for Art's Sake',

2 The Principles of Literary Criticism, by I. A. Richards. Kegan Paul. pp. vi, 286. 108. 6d.

being dismissed, as a single and sufficing principle of judgement, on the same grounds. In chapter xvi Richards undertakes the ' analysis of a poem', distinguishing six distinct kinds of events' in the experience of the reader, ranging from the visual sensations of the printed words, the 'tied' and 'free' images excited by that'thin trickle of stimulation' to the emotive reactions and 'attitudes' or incipient impulses to act. Much of this had been well worked out before, as by Wundt, especially the play of sensation on the stored-up images ('an immense hierarchy of systems of tendencies poised in the most delicate stability', as he excellently says. The chapter on 'Rhythm and Metre' similarly lays the stress not on particular arrangements of words and syllables but on our response to them. The effect of metre is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings, setting up as it does so extraordinarily extensive sympathetic reverberations.' He is here confessedly drawing upon the Biographia Literaria, 'that lumber-room of neglected wisdom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever written upon the subject'. Ensuing chapters touch on the allied art of painting and the 'impasse of musical theory'-psychology still confessedly standing helpless before the riddle which Browning long ago conveyed in his phrase 'not a fourth sound but a star',-the incalculable effect of two or more sound-stimuli combined. In the ensuing discussions of 'Communication', 'the Normality of the Artist', and 'Levels of Response and Width of Appeal' a more exact interpretation of literary experience is applied to the relation of artist and public; to the fact, for instance, that the 'universal' appeal of a Shakespeare means a number of partial appeals to distinct audiences who admire him very largely for distinct things. In the valuable chapter on Imagination (xxxii), the focus of the book, Richards uses the fundamental ideas of the Biographia Literaria (purged of their metaphysic) to interpret both Shelley and Aristotle. The reconciliation... of Pity and Terror in an ordered single response is the catharsis by which Tragedy is recognized, whether Aristotle meant anything of this kind or not. . . . The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us to live for the moment without' the subter

fuges and suppressions by which we ordinarily 'dodge the full development of experience'. The joy which is so strangely the heart of the [tragic] experience is not an indication that "all's right with the world", ... but that all is right here and now with the nervous system.' This does not mean anything so crude as it may suggest; still, a diagnosis of tragic experience as a state of the completely healthy mind which 'does not shy away from anything' but 'stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone, and self-reliant', describes rather the temper of stoicism than that of either the hero or the spectator of supreme tragedy. Bradley's interpretation, as a 'reconciliation', ('a consciousness of greatness in pain') surely renders more truly the mood in which we are left by Othello or King Lear. The closing chapters of the book develop in a striking way the distinction between the 'scientific and the emotional', or 'suggestive', uses of language, and the reaction of poetry upon belief. Richards's position as a specialist both in literature and psychology enables him here to mediate in an important way. Sweeping aside all 'revelation' theories of poetry as illusory, he yet holds that these doctrines 'when we know what they are really about, come nearer to supplying an explanation of the value of the arts than any of the other traditional accounts'. Some poetry seems to 'lift away the burden of existence, and we seem to ourselves to be looking into the heart of things'. 'The central experience of Tragedy is . . . indispensable for a fully developed life.' 'But in the reading of King Lear what facts verifiable by science . . . are relevant? None whatever.' None, that is, save the one which underlies the whole situation thus trenchantly analysed, the production of King Lear itself at a given time and place by a human brain.

...

To this still unexhausted problem of tragic experience, seen from a more purely literary angle, Professor Macneile Dixon has devoted the greater part of his volume on Tragedy. Mr. Dixon is therefore not concerned to give a conspectus of Tragedy, to classify its varieties, to distinguish its 'types': he wants to pluck out the heart of the mystery, and nothing but the very best and greatest will serve. Everything is thence ruled out,

3 Tragedy, by W. Macneile Dixon. Arnold. pp. viii, 228. 6s. net.

in effect, but the work of the three Athenians and Shakespeare; on the whole it is Aeschylus and Shakespeare who sway and inspire his thinking, and, as between these, it is Aeschylus whose tragedy most completely satisfies him. He thus deliberately forgoes certain clues and safeguards enjoyed by more catholic surveys, such as Professor T. Volkelt's exhaustive monograph Die Tragödie, or C. E. Vaughan's Types of Tragedy. Throughout the first half of the book the sublimity of the universe in the awful shadow of which Aeschylean tragedy moves gives this a grave if not final advantage over the secular art of Shakespeare, whose 'easier but less fortunate lot it was to find imagination anchored to earth, diminished in dignity; and thus to the wonder of succeeding generations he appears himself without religion, blind or indifferent to the larger questions, the continuity, and the whole of things'. And if you begin, as Dixon does, by describing Tragedy as 'poetry's point of implication with philosophy and religion', Shakespeare's secularity must necessarily appear a damning blot. We are accustomed to say that for us moderns character' replaces destiny'. Dixon will not have this, save with large reserves. 'Character is itself a strange and terrible thing, and assuredly has a place in tragedy, but to be admitted as a factor only, no further than as a part of the interminable web, the side of the pattern visible to us. . . . Naked tragedy overlooks shades of character. Its essence is that such things happened to a man, a human being like ourselves.' Hence the complex and profound world even of Shakespearian character shrinks together in his hands. Why do we 'torture so simple and intelligible a play as Hamlet, making of it an enigma where there is in fact none'? We will here only interpose the question, whether Shakespearian character at its greatest does not open up depths more truly mysterious and awe-inspiring than the Olympian deities from whom Aeschylus never disengaged his art: whether Shakespeare does not, more certainly than Wordsworth himself, realize Wordsworth's great confession of the awe with which he looked into the mind of man, passing in its presence 'Jehovah and his shouting angels' unalarmed?

From this standpoint the rationalist Aristotle and his theory of tragedy, which Aeschylus did so little to suggest, was likely