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to fare ill. Dixon corrects common misconceptions about 'pity' and fear, but for him the true interpretation of tragic 'fear' lifts it above the plane of Aristotelian thinking altogether. He quotes Bergson's fine saying: True pity consists not so much in fearing suffering as in desiring it, as if Nature were committing some great injustice and it were necessary to get rid of all complicity with her.' That suggestion of a heroic and selfless desire to suffer, reckless of consequences, so long as that complicity is set aside, touches the heart of Dixon's conception of Tragedy. We understand now the better his exaltation of the Aeschylean world, which just because it is incurably wounded 'provides a superb amphitheatre for such men as are content to match themselves with gods and natural powers, and if need be die in action'. The famous 'catharsis', similarly, even when interpreted in the closest accord with Aristotle's probable thought, is reduced to a theory as pretty as it is popular'. The ȧμapría which Aristotle thought necessary for the ideal hero of tragedy becomes a merely secondary trait : the ideal hero is one who, like Antigone, suffers without blame; -a fate which to Aristotle seemed too shocking for tragedy, but which to our critic seems the more truly tragic because heroism is here disengaged from the last shred of reconciling reason. We cannot but ask, here as at other points in his striking book, whether he does not simplify too much. He is so bent upon isolating the heroic from consoling or justifying reason that he comes near suggesting that sheer calamity, as such, if magnificently, defiantly borne, is tragic. This brings us naturally to the criticism of Hegel, an antagonist even more strongly entrenched than Aristotle in the anti-tragic fortresses of pure reason. He justly assails Hegel's doctrine of a conflict between two representatives of opposite forms of spiritual good as an even approximate account of tragedy. But this does not lessen the value of the contention that a conflict between two powers both embodying some spiritual good, and wasteful or ruinous, as Bradley says, for both, holds a richer measure of tragic quality than the simple ruin of innocence, whatever splendour of heroism this may provoke. The tragic glory of Antigone is not diminished, but the intellectual significance of the drama is increased, if Creon be taken to have a kind of

reason, however, immeasurably lower than hers, and not merely brute force, on his side. So with Macbeth and Iago, and the rest. But intellectual significance is just what Dixon, in his poet's intoxication with the heroic, is inclined, to our thinking, too lightly to forgo. We must be content to refer to his fascinating criticisms of the anti-Hegelian Schopenhauer, whose tragic hero, resigned and disillusioned, satisfies him as little as Hegel's, and of Nietzsche, 'that Hotspur of the mind', whose epoch-making Die Geburt der Tragödie is far too little known in England, though its brilliant antithesis of Dionysus and Apollo has become in some measure critical property. In conclusion, let us say that Dixon's book, if it fail at times in breadth, is pervaded by a passionate faith in greatness. Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas', he is fond of quoting from St. Augustine, and it is this kind of truth which he has brilliantly proclaimed.

Mr. Beaumont's study in the theory of tragedy, and in particular of the nature of the tragic Hero, is mainly devoted to one more detailed scrutiny of Hamlet. Since his conclusion, however, is that 'all those phenomena in life and in art to which the term "tragic" can be applied are best explained as attempts to overcome a feeling of inferiority, which are always directed towards some goal of superiority', the case of Hamlet is not obviously apposite; nor do his hundred pages and more of ingenious argument persuade us that it is so in fact. Much better suited to Beaumont's thesis are characters like Hedda Gabler, Solness, and Iago, genuine examples or victims of the morbid passion for power, to whom in fact the last and most cogent pages of the essay are devoted. But why magnify Ibsen's powerful yet consciously provincial creations into types of all tragedy? And why ignore that the diagnosis successfully applied to a great but secondary personage, the contriver of the harms in Othello, when applied to Othello himself, the real hero, completely fails? Othello, in fact, seems to be the very antithesis of Beaumont's conception of the tragic hero. Far from being oppressed by the insecurity' which is always goading his hero' to improve his position, Othello is only too The Hero: A Theory of Tragedy, by Albert Beaumont. Routledge. pp. 174. 4s. 6d.

magnificently secure; and this temper, so obnoxious to ruin from within and without, is surely one of the prevailing notes of Shakesperian tragedy. But of course Hamlet provides some food for almost every theory of him. He tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is ambitious; he browbeats Gertrude and Ophelia by way of asserting his 'masculine' power. The final urge to kill the king is thus made to rest on a prospect of being free at last from his terrible responsibilities. Beaumont thinks he has thus given a more definite meaning to the 'melancholy' of Dr. Bradley's view. But it is clear that he has left yet more important things out. We do not think slightly of Beaumont's essay, which abounds in fine observation and acute criticism. But, like most Hamlet studies, it is better in its survey of predecessors than in its original contribution. Its doctrine of 'security' is based upon the valuable investigations of Adler, Stoll, and Schücking; the 'Als ob' philosophy of Vaihinger and the Freudian Oedipus-complex also are variously called into play, the last, happily, to be declined as, at least for Beaumont's thesis, irrelevant.

Professor Warwick Bond discusses with much apt illustration and suggestion The Art of Narrative Poetry'. The essay is the more apposite at a time when, in spite of some distinguished examples of the story in verse, the tides of literature, and, as this survey may have suggested, of critical discussion set with predominant strength towards lyric style and dramatic form.

Mr. John Buchan gave before the Royal Society of Literature a discourse on 'The Old and New in Literature' which seems to deprecate a place in the sober chronicle of 'English Work'. But like other 'Imaginary Conversations', of longer reputation and more pretence, this dialogue, or pair of dialogues, is a serious and weighty critical pronouncement, and the force of its stylistic felicities is by no means exhausted in the sparkle of its wit. As might be expected, 'the Old' and 'the New' are not, in Mr.Buchan's hands, very internecine enemies, and the apologue of a Boar choked

"In Essays by Divers Hands, vol. iv (1924), ed. by Sir Edmund Gosse. O.U.P. for R.S.L. pp. x+156. 7s. net.

In Essays by Divers Hands, vol. v, ed. by John Drinkwater. for R.S.L. pp. viii+138. 7s. net.

O.U.P.

off by a timely application of Greek, with which it begins and ends, is a menacing emblem only for the more hopeless members of either party-the crusted antiques in whom youth is dead, and the boys who never grow up. The claims of youth, and its achievements in literature, are notoriously very urgently asserted in our day, and Mr. Buchan by no means puts them by. Like his Septimus', the shrewd old scholar of the Athenaeum, to whom he reports the talk of Theophilus', the well-equipped champion of youth, he nods approvingly, not seldom, at the young man's dicta. The upshot would seem to be: Youth, with all its daring, its freedom, its opportunities, its bold novels and its 'free verse'-while you are young; then-'ten years after', criticism and critical theory. 'Septimus' (and Mr. Buchan, we take it, with him) makes sharp and significant reserves to his general approval of the methods and dogmas of youth. In particular he demands 'form' and all that it implies. Fidelity to 'Life' is right. But fidelity does not mean copying without reserve or choice. Detail must not only be 'true' but significant. 'Sex' is not all-important because it is ubiquitous. Tragedy (and here we recognize Mr. Buchan's most distinctive note) does not arise from a monotony of distress, or of 'drab, dismal pathology'; suffering must find a vent in action. This is, in effect, the Aristotelian Greek' which Mr. Buchan administers, thus agreeably, to the Boar of literary Error.

Viscount Grey's address on 'The Pleasure of Reading', printed in the same volume, has, besides its urbane charm, a special and rather unusual value for English Work', as a diagnosis of English books from the standpoint, less of the critic or scholar, than of the cultivated and sensitive reader. Lord Grey's quietly indicated tastes and preferences are themselves, however, an implicit criticism upon much current writing. It may be thought that the authority of his praise is given too insistently to the safe, and 'good', literature which leaves alone the darker enigmas and more dangerous excitements of life; and that if Wordsworth is his 'favourite poet" (as, according to an amusing anecdote here told, he was also Lord Morley's) it was more in virtue of the 'tranquillity' than of the emotion' of his poetry. But his taste for tranquillity and the books which embalm it is that of one familiar with great literature, who has been where great

issues were decided in the life of men and nations; it is the 'master-bias' of a 'Happy Warrior' for home-felt pleasures and for gentle scenes. Moreover, Lord Grey can pay a delightful tribute to Dumas, whose romances owe as little to the genius of repose as any in the world.

We pass from these discussions of fundamental problems to a group of literary histories.

Professor A. Nicoll's survey of British drama is an important and valuable book, the best short view' of our entire dramatic history that has yet appeared. His qualifications as a dramatic historian were already attested by his work upon the Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama, and upon dramatic theory. This survey of the entire development naturally bears the mark of these predilections, but not in such a degree as seriously to disturb proportion. Relative space occupied is a rough test, but may serve to give a notion of the architectonics of the book. Out of 460 pages the Restoration and Eighteenth Century have some 85; the Beginnings to Shakespeare's Predecessors 100, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans 110, the Early Nineteenth Century 30, and the Modern Revival 130. Evidently times and tastes have changed since Ward, the classical dramatic historian of the Victorian age, adopted the death of Queen Anne as the terminus, save for some sporadic Goldsmith or Sheridan born after his time, of English dramatic history worthy of record. With Nicoll, the dramatic centre of gravity has moved very unmistakably forward towards our own time. We suspect that the modern period, to which he has given nearly a third of the book, is, for him, hardly inferior in distinction and import to the once exclusively idolized Elizabethan age. Mr. Shaw he pronounces the greatest dramatist of modern times. This chapter is not only full, like the whole book, of matter, but is written with the lively gusto of a keen and constant playgoer. It is precisely one of the virtues of Nicoll's survey of the drama that he never detaches it from the theatre. He sees it being played on the stage, the particular stage of its epoch, not written in the pages of books. And it is only with the contemporary drama that

"British Drama: An Historical Survey from the Beginning to the Present Time, by Allardyce Nicoll. Harrap. pp. 428. 12s. 6d.