this is more than occasionally possible. But he is no less keenly concerned with the theatre as a field for imaginative stagereform. In traversing more beaten ground the interest in dramaturgical motives often gives the cue to the criticism: the page and a half on Hamlet is mainly occupied with expanding the daring thesis (based on Stoll's theory) that it would probably have been entirely forgotten had it not been for the production in 1599 of Marston's Antonio and Mellida. The purely literary criticism is rarely striking. But it is almost uniformly competent. And the delineation of what may be called the anatomy of our drama as a living and growing body, with distinctly articulated members in phases of evolution, is throughout, so far as our observation goes, effected with the skill of one thoroughly familiar with the matter and apt with his tools.

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Mr. Clark's Study of Modern Drama is an example of the best kind of American book, competent at every point but never pretentious, controlled by business' instinct without the least flavour of the shop, admirably written without a hint of phraseological display, selective or exhaustive according to occasion in its handling of the enormous field surveyed. Practically all the countries which have in the last half-century possessed a living drama are represented, together with the homeless Yiddish drama. Most of the foreign countries, however, are represented only by one, two, or three dramatists, and these usually by one drama each. Thus Strindberg stands alone for Sweden with The Father and There are Crimes and Crimes; Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, Andreyev, for Russia, with one play each; Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Wedekind for Germany. Ibsen himself is represented by only four plays (The Pretenders, Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler), Denmark, Hungary, Belgium, Holland, by one each. D'Annunzio's La Gioconda is chosen alone to represent this prolific dramatist, a choice which, like some others, suggests that Clark's selection has been controlled rather by a play's importance for dramatic technique than for its quality as a poetic creation. Otherwise, one might demur to the inclusion of Rosmersholm and The Wild Duck. A Study of the Modern Drama, by Barrett H. Clark. New York: Appleton. pp. xi+527. $3.50.

About half the book is given to England and America. Clark carries out rigorously his own description of the book as 'a handbook for study'. Space is rigorously economized, biographical detail reduced to a minimum, while discussion of the chosen play, in numbered paragraphs, is largely thrown into the form of quasi-Socratic questions, always on points of technical interest, and with admirable alertness of mind for new solutions such as, in fact, the 'modern' drama offers or suggests in abundance, of traditional problems.

In Anglia, Bd. xlix, Prof. W. Schirmer gives a succinct survey of The Sonnet in English Literature', principally from the standpoint of metrical structure. Starting from the now established view, that the Italian sonnet originated in a union of two quasi-stanzas, which became the octave and the sestet, and that the structure based on these components is therefore fundamental, he traces the notoriously fluctuating acceptance of this law in Elizabethan and later periods of English. He scarcely does justice to the point of view that the ElizabethansShakespeare in particular-justified their partial infidelity to the Italian model by the beauty and power of the new mould (three quatrains and a couplet) into which they mostly recast the form. Drayton too (who was not a one sonnet man as we are told, p. 15) must be reckoned among the greater sonneteers. Milton, while closely following Italian forms (as Smart has shown), yet made the sonnet more individual, and in a lofty sense more English, than any predecessor. Schirmer's standpoint leads him to do perhaps more than justice to Goethe's technically very finished and beautiful sonnets, in comparison with the often irregular work of our Romantics; even Wordsworth's, 'Italian' in structure though they mainly are, and though Schirmer thinks them 'the chief basis of his fame', hardly receive their due. The climax is found in Rossetti. Mrs. Browning is treated as the imitator of a freer and more 'modern' handling of the sonnet, which ramifies far and wide in the later nineteenth century. The essay crowds a mass of useful matter into its limited compass, and glances usefully at the sonnet on the Continent. A note on Carducci's might have been added.

Professor Hugh Walker's English Satire and Satirists' is the last of the series of volumes called 'The Channels of English Literature', each purporting to relate in outline the history, in England, of a particular literary genre. The scope of the subject, so treated, is not quite easy to define. Dr. Walker lays down, very properly, that the nature and aims of a literary species are not to be determined by its lowly origins. But the trouble is that 'satire' is itself a relatively low kind, tending in the hands of genius not to be merely supreme in that kind, but to pass over into a higher, to become creative poetry or imaginative humour. So great a satirist as Chaucer will balk the historian of his natural prey when the Wife of Bath, for instance, becomes under his hands, not the satire on celibacy, or on lascivious women, that she was perhaps originally meant to be, but a superb humorous creation. And the case is not otherwise, we think, though Dr. Walker disagrees, with the Rape of the Lock itself. In a brief introductory chapter this and other questions relating to the delimitation of the 'Channel' are judiciously discussed. The narrative begins, where 'English satire' itself begins, in the twelfth century. The emergence of Horatian or Juvenalian satire in the sixteenth century made a new epoch, which closed only with the rise of 'the new satire of Burns and Byron. Its fluctuating history is told in five excellent chapters, rich in varied and often out-of-the-way learning, and on the whole lucidly ordered. The type, both in style and in metre, was not found at once; but Walker justly vindicates for Wyatt, though he leaned to Italian verseforms, the position of the pioneer in the movement, of three centuries' duration, which culminates in Dryden and Pope. This was the persistent ground-tone of English satire, suspended, but never broken off during that period. But other varieties of satiric music, for the most part harsher and cruder, sounded again and again across this ground-tone-the diatribes of Wither, the Italianate gaiety of Suckling, the mock-Cervantean raillery of Butler, the quintessential apologues of Swift. To all these, and many more, Walker brings both the understanding of a close student and the high critical standard only attained by • English Satire and Satirists, by Hugh Walker. Dent. pp. viii+325. 78. 6d.

intimacy with the greatest things that have been written and thought. Prose satire, again, has a history of its own, which only at moments touches satire in verse, as it does in seventeenthcentury epigram and 'character'. Nineteenth-century satire embarked on new ways of its own, abruptly discarding the tradition of Dryden and Pope; and Walker's last chapter describes, with the scholarship we expect from the historian of Victorian Literature, the several varieties of the satirist's 'indignation' which made memorable literature in Hood, Browning, Thackeray, Arnold, and Butler.

We turn to a series of books and articles devoted to individual problems of criticism. In 'Smith College Studies in Modern Languages' (April 1924) Miss Rose F. Egan completes her valuable study of The Genesis of the Theory of 'Art for Art's Sake' in Germany and in England, of which the first section appeared in the same Studies in 1921. This is summarized in the opening pages of the present article. M. Lanson had already, as she points out, marked out the main roads' for the investigator of the origins of the doctrine, clearly distinguishing the form of it current among the early French Romantics from that proclaimed by the Flauberts and the Paters of the later century; and pointing to its probable origin-Kant and the German Romantic, Friedrich Schlegel. This fruitful and substantially accurate suggestion Miss Egan follows up and develops by a penetrating account of the whole intricate chapter of aesthetic history in which these, with Schiller and Goethe, and Fichte and Schelling, are the centres of interest and influence. When Kant defined artistic creation as 'imagination's free conformity to law', he was in effect founding the doctrine of the artist's autonomy which philosophers who knew little of art transmitted to artists who knew nothing of philosophy. In this field, as in ethics and metaphysics, Kant did in fact discover an issue from dilemmas which had filled the eighteenth century with barren debate. Between the claims of the neo-classics to impose 'rules' and the claim of the 'Sturm und Drang' to follow 'nature' or the lawless impulses of genius, he intervened with the profound conception of an inner law, in free service of which the imagination, in creation, works. How Schiller's more sensuous and sensitive intellect, fertilized

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and enriched by Kant, transformed his doctrine into his own brilliant and exalted aestheticism, has often been told, and Miss Egan points out clearly and precisely how the process bore upon the evolution of the Art for Art's sake'. That 'Art' (Kunst) itself now acquired a new connotation-came to stand, not for execution according to rules, but for creation according to the law of the imagination, was not merely a symptom of the process, but a sign that it was potentially complete. Schiller's ethical idealism, but for the Kantian bent of his thought, might have made him the stern antagonist of art for art's sake' which ethical idealists are apt to be in Anglo-Saxon communities. But 'art' with him, the supreme educative instrument of moral good, was itself sovranly detached from actuality of any kind, a 'play' emancipated from all the limitations imposed by the senses and understanding, even those, for instance, involved in the distinction between one art and another. When the arts come to resemble one another, he says in the aesthetic Briefe (preparing the way for Wagner), they achieve more than is possible within the limits of a single type. Each of the greater thinkers and poets contributed something to this common conception of art as Freedom won through fulfilment of an inner law. Friedrich Schlegel (the most original of the German Romantics) brought the notion of 'Irony' as the mark of the artist's lofty and amused detachment. Fichte and Schelling exalted the nature of the artist, and thus justified his autonomy, by making personality and creative genius (in their several fashions) unique and divine. Goethe, exalting individuality no less, urged as the condition of self-fulfilment self-restraint. We trust that Miss Egan will proceed to trace the transformations of this German doctrine in the alien temperaments of artists and thinkers beyond the Rhine and the North Sea.

Mr. W. C. Brownell's The Genius of Style 10 is an attempt, by one who has passed through a long discipline both of thought and practice in these matters, to press closer to the secret of what we admire in writing that we call 'good'. Mr. Brownell is acutely aware of the problem-which we often ignore-involved

10 The Genius of Style, by W. C. Brownell. New York: Scribners. pp. 226. 10s. net.