Shakespeare abroad, she contributed three dialogues to Lord Lyttleton's Dialogues of the Dead'! A hasty reader might suppose Johnson to be speaking of her Essay, but his opinion of that effusion is recorded, and it is not favourable. Similarly, it is impossible to accept Miss Meakin's estimate of Hannah More's poems, plays, novels, and moral writings, which can scarcely rank as literature at all, in the exact sense. Her life remains of interest partly because of her character and virtues, but still more because of her intimate associations with people much greater than herself Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, and their circle, Horace Walpole, Wilberforce, to mention only a few of them-and because of her eager participation in the religious and political thought of the times. Miss Meakin succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the circle in which Hannah More moved, and for this, in spite of occasional diffuseness, we are grateful to her.

X

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

[By MONTAGUE SUMMERS]

IT is both pleasant and encouraging to recognize how many books of considerable merit and no little critical faculty there have been recently issued whose chief aim is a more or less general survey of English literature during the past one hundred and twenty years. Such writing covers a wide field, and this extended scope of itself shows that, in spite of much deadness and neglect, there exists in more quarters than one might at first suspect a very real and vital interest in modern English literature.

Although not primarily perhaps so much concerned with literature as with social, psychological, and moral problems, Dr. Havelock Ellis's The Philosophy of Conflict1 is by no means the least important and the least interesting of such essays. By virtue of his pages upon Herbert Spencer, his essay on Abraham Cowley, and his chapter Mr. Conrad's World', the book falls well within our province. Few things have been better done in a dozen pages' compass than Dr. Ellis's clear vision of Conrad's genius.

Of particular interest is Mr. J. Middleton Murry's The Function of Criticism which prefaces Aspects of Literature.2 Here we have boldly stated that we must perforce 'go back to the Greeks for the principles of art and criticism', and 'only

1 The Philosophy of Conflict and other Essays in War-Time. Second Series. By Havelock Ellis. London: Constable & Co., Ltd. vi+299 pp. 6s. 6d. net.

2 Aspects of Literature. Essays in Literary Criticism, by J. Middleton Murry. MCMXX. London: 48 Pall Mall, S.W. W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., Glasgow, Melbourne, Auckland. ix+204 pp. 10s. net.

those critics who have returned to bathe themselves in the lifegiving source have made enduring contributions to criticism'. This is doubtless too sweeping and dogmatic, but none the less it is an understandable point of view, and one which, as is pretty clearly indicated in the literary world to-day, will meet with much sympathy and championship. Yet it cannot justly be proclaimed as the sole and exclusive point of view, and it is certainly excessive to particularize Plato's Republic as 'The most magnificently human of all books that has ever been written'. Mr. Murry, we apprehend, will not recognize that Dryden is the greatest of all English critics; in fact, it would hardly be an exaggeration to delete the adjective; for he speaks of Mr. Eliot as elevating 'Dryden to a purple which he is quite unfitted to wear', and this it is scarcely possible to do. In his Preface Mr. Murry recants 'a quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer'. This is good, but it would have been better completely to have blotted the thoughtless sentences which state that 'Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that belong to one'. It is insufficient to disclaim such a judgement; and in a second edition of the book it should most certainly be excised. Mr. Murry's essays cover a wild field. He ranges from Ronsard to Mr. Aiken; he has interesting things to tell us about Rousseau, Tchekov, Keats, the Present Condition of English Poetry, Shakespeare Criticism. Indeed, his view is that criticism can only be of cogency and value when it deals with specific works of art, and in criticism the intimate relation of literature to life cannot be too emphatically insisted upon and maintained.

In the volume of essays which he has published under the name Tradition and Change,3 Mr. Arthur Waugh confines himself to contemporary literature, dividing his book into two parts, Studies in Poetry and Studies in Prose. Many of these have been collected from the various monthlies and reviews, and it was well worth bringing them together. The first study, The

3 Tradition and Change. Waugh. (Second edition.) +303 pp. 7s. 6d. net.

Studies in Contemporary Literature, by Arthur
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1919. viii

2

!

New Poetry, is often most illuminating, especially when
Mr. Waugh convinces the modern school of one of the worst
faults that beset young and somewhat irresponsible writers-
'the itch to say a thing in such an arresting fashion as to shock
the literary purist into attention even against his will'. Very
sound and salutary, too, are many of his comments upon the
achievement of Rupert Brooke. It is pleasant to meet with
an appreciation of Stephen Phillips, who, if only for his golden
days, well deserved some such tribute of gratitude and esteem.
But we are even more grateful for the pages on Lionel Johnson,
a poet who has not yet earned his meed of recognition.
There is a vast deal of wisdom in Dickens's Lovers and some
very shrewd psychology. Very different indeed is the world of
1850 to the New Realism as it finds expression in the pages of
Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Gilbert Cannan, and Mr. Compton
Mackenzie. Concerning the last Mr. Waugh has some valuable
remarks to offer. It was hardly possible adequately to deal with
the Religious Novel in eight or nine pages, and although there are
some thoughtful phrases, such as that which describes the late
Monsignor Benson's first book, The Light Invisible, as artisti-
cally blameless in its subtle suggestion of atmosphere, neverthe-
less the essay is, on the whole, indicative rather than critical.

Not the least element of the real attractiveness of Mr. Waugh's criticism is the simple bonhomie with which he delivers judgement. He is always candid, but he is always kindly.

Mr. Douglas Goldring, on the other hand, is too often prone to deliver his verdict with a vehemence that deprives it of half its force. In his essay, Three Georgian Novelists there is much truth, but there is more ill-temper. We are reminded of an anecdote of Dr. Johnson, who, when once asked by Topham Beauclerk why Pope had written the couplet,

Let modest Foster, if he will, excel

Ten metropolitans in preaching well.

replied: "Sir, he hoped it would vex somebody.' We cannot

4

* Reputations. Essays in Criticism, by Douglas Goldring. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1920. vii+232 pp. 78. 6d. net.

help feeling that Mr. Goldring hopes many of his pages will vex somebody. His most pleasing essay is that entitled 1855. Here he creates real atmosphere with the result that a very distinct picture is given of the dark 'morning-room' and its shelves crammed with the flotsam of outmoded books, Akenside, Byron with steel engravings, Rogers and Campbell in elaborate editions, and above all, resting on a pile of four albums, 'a battered casket of the brightest green enamel, adorned with brass fittings and an elaborate plaque representing an Oriental building, with a number of gentlemen in the foreground with turbans on their heads, wearing baggy trousers. This picture was called Le Palais du Bey de Tunis.' This description Mr. Goldring may rest assured is worth far more than his praise of cinemas and music-halls and silly girding at 'the intellectuals'.

Letters to X are written in an easy familiar style, but although they contain much desultory criticism that makes agreeable reading, they also gossip too freely about small things, and discuss the obvious and the commonplace at a length only to be encouraged by the most leisured readers. The pages on Old Books are pleasant ambling enough, and A Belated Elizabethan gives us a welcome little study of George Lillo, who is, however, by no means so obscure a name as the writer appears to imagine. Sir Adolphus Ward, for example, has edited The London Merchant and Fatal Curiosity with full notes and a detailed introduction, an excellent and most serviceable recension. Chapters XXII and XXIII, again, of the Letters, Mysticism Old and New, are about anything in the world except mysticism.

The title of the next volume, Literature in a Changing Age, is sufficiently indicative of the scope covered by this study from the pen of a Professor of English in Columbia University.

5 Letters to X, from H. J. Massingham. London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1919. viii+298 pp. 6s. net.

• Literature in a Changing Age, by Ashley H. Thorndike, Professor of English in Columbia University. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920. 318 8 pp.

12s.