in our demand both for something to be expected in all good writers and something in addition which is personal to each, and without which we find even his 'goodness' wanting in savour, and missing, as it were in the act of reaching, the end of good writing. His first chapter explains, with many subtle elaborations, the former or, as he calls it, the 'objective' element in style; constituted by 'order' and 'movement'. How the artist subjectively handles-or neglects-the objective element of style is his style', and this discrimination occupies the important second chapter. He encounters Buffon's famous dictum, of course, at the outset, an epigram of now recognized ambiguity, the true and intended sense of which he sets aside as irrelevant for his purpose, while the current sense ignores our special problem. In architecture, on the other hand, he finds examples, of illuminating force, of the union of the objective' and the individual quality, both in transcendent degree. Many writers have dwelt upon the contrast of Greek and Gothic style-the individual quality of each. Brownell admirably emphasizes the elements of objective style which they possess in common: 'Both do more than merely embody the characteristic manner of thought and feeling of their respective periods and countries. ... In addition, both are interpenetrated with the spirit of order and movement, of abstract form vivifying concrete expression by pouring into it the universal elements of harmony and rhythm.' In the chapter on The Art of Prose' he pleads for something beyond both these senses of style-' aesthetic' quality, a' richer' prose in short, and he criticizes with effect Arnold's reflection on the style of Burke and of Ruskin, as well as kindred formulas for perfect style as the 'simple, sincere, and direct'. Brownell's own style, precise, finely articulated, colourless, is the reverse of 'Asiatic'; but no champion of Asiatic luxuriance of expression could analyse more effectively the fallacies incident to the unqualified canonization of 'simplicity'.

In the first of his Two Studies in Epic Theory (Mod. Phil. xxii) Mr. Ralph C. Williams traces the intricate discussion by the literary theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy and France, of the demand, in epic, for 'verisimilitude' and the interpretation of this demand in view of the generally

accepted requirement of 'marvel'. The strong rationalist bent of classicist criticism tended to make the former demand absolute, and both Homer and Aristotle supported the adherents of 'verisimilitude' against those who stickled for 'veracity'. But Homer and Aristotle also compelled the admission of marvel as an intrinsic element in epic, and this led to a variety of ingenious explanations and accommodations, described and distinguished with patient scholarship by Mr. Williams. The second study points out a hitherto unsuspected plagiarism by Georges de Scudéry from Tasso's epic theory. This occurs in the Preface to his Alaric ou Rome Vaincue. That this epic was greatly influenced by Tasso's Gerusalemme has long been known. But no one had suspected that the Preface also is freely paraphrased from Tasso's Discorso del Poema Heroico. This Williams makes clear by ample quotations in parallel columns.

In her little essay, Poetry and Criticism,11 Miss Sitwell makes a vehement protest against the ways of much modern criticism in its dealings with much modern poetry. She reminds critics of the kind referred to of the egregious errors of critics in the past when confronted by the originalities of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. There is not the slightest difference between the criticism of the past and the criticism of to-day [some exceptions being duly allowed] excepting that the latter are more vulgar, and often more personally abusive.' The points at issue are, however, not the same. Wordsworth battled for a poetry not verbally distinct from prose. This teaching (though it hardly held the real vis of the Wordsworthian revelation) led, Miss Sitwell thinks, to 'monstrous excesses of dulness'. It is therefore time to return to an earlier, Elizabethan or Jacobean, tradition. It is scarcely, however, on any 'traditional' grounds that she vindicates the 'technique' and the original vision' of modernist poetry. She says with justice that the senses of many people are practically unused, and convey to the brain only the limited information determined by convention and habit; the modernist poet's brain is becoming', on the contrary, 'a central sense, interpreting and controlling the other five senses'. This, as a postu11 Poetry and Criticism, by Edith Sitwell. Hogarth Press. pp. 28. 28. 6d.

late, if not as a fact, is strikingly put. But Miss Sitwell hardly recognizes how precarious, for the poet himself, this doctrine, freely acted on, still is; and her own illustration from a Modernist 'aubade the morning light creaks down again'-in spite of her six lines of explanation, does little, in our view, to support it.

Mr. Edwin H. Zeydel, in a brief article, Sociological Aspects of Criticism (Mod. Lang. Notes, vol. xxxix), points to the growing but still incomplete recognition of social conditions, in particular the character, wants, and opinions of the public or audience, as a transforming factor in all literature. He exemplifies Schücking's application of this doctrine to the study of Shakespeare's characters, and refers to the sociological treatment of literature by the new school of Sauer and Nadler, with which he proposes to deal later in another article.

Mr. Paul Kauffmann, in Defining Romanticism: A Survey and a Program (Mod. Lang. Notes, vol. xl), takes up the problem, felt by all careful writers on literature to be increasingly urgent (cf. A. Lovejoy, On the Discrimination of Romanticism (P. M. L. A., xxxix)—that of reaching an agreement as to the connotation of this now almost useless term. He proposes a systematic campaign, with the object of reaching, by a survey of past and current usage, a serviceable definition. Three points of special difficulty are recognized: 1. The relation of 'romance' and 'romanticism'-distinct but constantly identified or confused. 2. The necessity of distinguishing between form, content, and temper in the application of the term. 3. The question as to 'the fields of human interest in which we shall decide romanticism to be a proper descriptive term; is it to be confined to aesthetics, or to be treated as philosophic, or as sociologic? or may it denote a fundamental impulse in human nature ('rebellion against restraints, élan vital', &c.)?

Mr. Middleton Murry has chosen to give his volume of critical essays a challenging title.12 But he discounts its apparent implication by explaining that his discoveries' are such only for himself. The gist of the book is, we are told, the con

12 Discoveries: Essays on Literary Criticism, by John Middleton Murry. Collins. pp. 314. 78. 6d.

tention that Shakespeare is the key to modern literature, and the standard by which it is to be judged'. Even so we might demur; an absolute standard, if there be one, cannot ignore the Greeks, cannot ignore Dante. But Mr. Murry does not in reality start from Shakespeare. If Shakespeare provides the key to modern literature', the Russian novelists, in particular Dostoevsky, have first provided him with the key to Shakespeare. He sees Shakespeare from the angle of Dostoevsky, somewhat as Ulrici or Gervinus saw him from the angle of Hegel, or as Tieck saw him from the angle of myth and fairy lore. The 'key' Shakespeare, for him, is the Shakespeare of the last period, which to our eyes (perhaps illusively) appears touched, or even permeated, by the ideal of reconciliation. 'Shakespeare's Mirandas and Perditas are the counterpart of Dostoevsky's Alyosha.' The attempt to interpret Shakespeare as a whole from this angle gives occasion to much finely phrased but very questionable criticism. The opening essay on 'The Nature of Poetry' continues the same theme, the nature of poetry and the nature of Shakesperean poetry' being declared to be the same thing. It may seem hazardous, even so, to find The Phoenix and the Turtle' the most perfect short poem in any language' on the ground that 'a virginal suprasensual love' is the highest experience which it is possible in poetry to give'. But here Mr. Murry seems to be adopting standards outside literature, to which neither Shakespeare nor even Dostoevsky provides the 'key'.

Even if English work' be interpreted strictly as work done in English literature and language, the publication of the two volumes of W. P. Ker's Essays 13 must be reckoned amongst the most signal events recorded here. Most of the thirty-nine essays collected had indeed been published before-as lectures at Oxford or Cambridge, at the Sorbonne, or before learned societies elsewhere, sometimes as shorter essays in T. L. S. The collection opens, fitly, even symbolically, with the essay on 'the Elizabethan voyagers'. For though Elizabethan voyaging itself produced little notable literature, nothing comparable, as Ker notes, with the Portuguese and Spanish romances and epics of

13 Collected Essays of W. P. Ker. With an Introduction by C. Whibley. Macmillan. pp. xxi +362; vi+352. 25s.

exploration, it was yet a symptom of audacities and splendours in intellect and imagination which became articulate in that literature elsewhere; and a kindred temper became articulate in the criticism and the scholarship of Ker. Not that the immense range of his learning, all of it wonderfully alive and erlebt, could be resolved by any such simple equation. He was as sensitive to the most elaborate artistries of literature as to its simplicities. Yet there is a perceptible quickening of the pulse and of the pace, a touch of eagerness, of abandon, when he is tracing these artistries in ballad and folksong, where art is nearest to the stir and thrill of living actuality; and the halfdozen papers on the ballads bear more vividly perhaps than any others the stamp of his personality. Artist and climber, at once, himself, he brought to the interpretation of all other artistries the thrill which is the antithesis of pedantry. Even the Eighteenth Century, in his hands, has 'put off the sober vesture of Carlyle's Age of Prose, and become one of the greatest ages of the world in artistic imagination', as well as 'the great heroic age of England'. He saw with luminous clearness its recoveries of medieval, its premonitions of modern, romance, and described the former in one of the most memorable chapters of the C. H. E. L. His work upon this age will be spoken of in more detail in chapter x of this survey. Of all our critics it was probably Dryden who was most to his mind: Dryden, whose 'virtue', as he says in the great introductory essay here (perhaps needlessly) reprinted, 'is that in a time when literature was pestered and cramped with formulas he found it impossible to write otherwise than freely ', and who expressed his own and his exponent's temper in the kindling sentence about the Heroic Poem, as when truly such', 'undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform '.

The eleventh volume of Essays and Studies 14 deals with several periods and aspects of English study, but two of the articles may be conveniently dealt with here. Mr. A. N. Monkhouse's 'The Words and the Play' is a shrewd and reasoned plaidoyer, by a dramatist and dramatic critic of note, with stageheretics of various types between the kinema, which would 14 Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. Vol. XI. Collected by Oliver Elton. O.U.P. pp. 169. 7s. 6d.