of Dryden; and Professor Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature.'

Mr Courthope approaches our poetry in the temper special to the historian. He considers not so much what is the unique character of each poet, of each masterpiece, or the unique pleasure that either yields, as the large historic forces, often lying outside art altogether, by which poetic art has been shapen. The determining causes of poetry lie partly in politics and society, partly in metaphysical or ethical theory, and partly within art itself. These causes, all together, form the true environment of poetry, the 'milieu,' though the shallower usage of the term by the school of Taine is not in its favour. The 'milieu,' in this larger sense, operates over tracts of space and time; the sway of antique political ideas, of the thoughts of the Church, reaches far both backwards and forwards. We might add that this is also true of the artistic environment, and say truly that the 'milieu' of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is not so much Hampstead as the workshop of the dead Greek designer, or that that of Spenser's Hymn to Beauty' is the cell of the old Alexandrian or the later Italian mystic. The original force of Mr Courthope lies in his effort to apply such ideas to the story of English poetry, and may be acknowledged all the more frankly that his execution can often be criticised. He wipes out, at all events, the reproach that no Englishman has essayed a full-length philosophical history of the subject.

In the preface to his first volume, Mr Courthope discriminates his method alike from that of Warton, who did not think about currents and forces, and from a later one, of which he seems to imply that Mr Pater was a practitioner, and which seeks 'to interpret the phenomena of the remote past by mere personal sympathy.' Here a protest is required. Mr Pater did not choose the form of a history, but he gave himself a hard historic schooling, and he is more at home in the deeper streams of old poetic sentiment, and in the actual recesses of the Renaissance intellect, than his critic. He rather read his own experience and problems in the light of history than read them into history. In the power to recapture and express the fugitive essence of a dead author Mr Courthope is somewhat wanting, while Mr Pater had more of

that power than any of our writers since Coleridge. It is a happier task to speak of the value and freshness of what Mr Courthope has achieved.

He begins very far back. We are not complaining that his picture of the Empire and the Papacy, and of mediæval polity, is a portico to a history rather of all literature, or of all culture, than of English poetry. By English poetry is meant 'metrical compositions written in our language from the period at which it becomes fairly intelligible to readers of the present day'; that is, from about the fourteenth century onwards. On this showing we regret that the somewhat inappreciative chapter on Old English poetry was inserted. It is true that the thread of artistic continuity between Old and Middle English verse becomes very slender, and that the true formative influences on the latter came from Latin, from the South, from romance and satire. Yet it would have been accurate to dwell more clearly on the iron link forged by the Latin, as the medium of thought and devotion and hymnody, and of some secular things as well, between Old and Middle English sentiment. And the alliterative romances of Chaucer's time might have been better recognised; for the Troy-Book' and the long Morte Arthure' both fall within the definition above given of English poetry; they contain stately matter, and they are of note in history, since their form links two ages of our verse together, while their matter links England with Europe. Mr Courthope, however, not professing an exhaustive chronicle, leaves himself free to choose whatever illuminates his thesis. So long as he does not leave out too much good literature, there can be no demur. Wider natural sympathy might have saved him from comparing Boccaccio, in whom there is a noble quality, with Milton's Belial, and from lecturing Chaucer, whose homelier tales are as fresh as ever, for 'illegitimate coarseness and materialism.'

When Mr Courthope quits his relative and historic standpoint, it is often not to appreciate but to moralise. But an admirable fruit of his method is found in his chapter on The Early Renaissance.' There he traces some of the sentiments that in the fourteenth century began to be transmitted from the ancient to the modern world, not only by Petrarch, whose work, as a torch

bearer, is well understood, but, as is less often perceived, by Dante, whose conception of civic duty and nobility is by no means strictly medieval, resting on 'the antique image of Roman citizenship.' The very useful essay on 'Chaucer and Petrarch,' in the Studi Petrarcheschi' of Signor Carlo Segrè, has come out much more recently than Mr Courthope's chapter. The account of the Romance of the Rose,' of its influence, and of the course of allegory at the close of the Middle Ages, shows Mr Courthope's hold on those remote causes and subtle uniformities without which our poetry is unintelligible. We must abridge his page on the subject.

'Allegory' (he tells us), 'as it was understood and used by Dante, the accepted method of interpreting nature and Scripture, derived from the Platonised theology of the fifth and sixth centuries, and methodised in the system of the schoolmen, first becomes a mechanical part of poetry, and then slowly falls into disuse, in proportion as the scholastic logic itself gives way before the new experimental tests applied to the interpretation of nature. Allegory, again, regarded as a literary form of expression, has its original source in the genius for abstraction peculiar to the Latin language, which encouraged the use of the figure of personification in poetry In this sphere it enjoyed a longer life than in philosophy.... Lastly, the habit, common to the medieval poets, of inventing allegories, in which all these abstract personages should be grouped round the central figure of Love, had, doubtless, its far-off origin in the metaphysical conception of Eros pervading the Platonic philosophy. . . . A stream of kindred sentiment . . . coloured the whole code of chivalrous manners; and, from the new impulse thus given to the ancient Teutonic reverence for women, the troubadours, by the aid of Ovid and of models borrowed from the Arabs, developed the elaborate system of Provençal love poetry. The lyrical fervour of the Provençals, in the cooling atmosphere of the times, gradually became in its turn conventional and didactic; and the long series of allegories following the "Romance of the Rose" is mainly interesting as marking the fall of temperature in the institutions of chivalry' (vol. i, pp. 391, 392).

...

Such a passage, with its wide sweep of learned vision, shows the author at his very best; we thus win an observatory for the whole range of fifteenth century poetry in Scotland, and for much in sixteenth century England. The true method of history is here applied to

the life-chronicle of a literary form; it has not been done before, or not so well, in our language; and an example is supplied from which Mr Courthope's successors have no excuse for relapsing. We pass over the chapter on the ballads, which needs revising in the light of arguments advanced recently by Mr Gregory Smith, Mr Lang, and others. The 'Retrospect,' at the end of the first volume, which brings the whole story down to the verge of the English Renaissance, is all of fine quality, and contains one of the significant thoughts that help to sustain us amid the apparent welter of late mediæval verse.

'In each class, epic, lyric, and dramatic, we see a movement away from the original didactic purpose of poetry, either towards the direct imitation of nature, or towards the mere technical development of art' (p. 471). . . . ‘But while the principal forms of modern poetry have their origin in the ecclesiastical and feudal character of the Middle Ages, they are gradually modified by the whole movement of society towards a civil standard of life and thought' (p. 473).

This conception, of which we have not given Mr Courthope's full elucidation, forms one of the texts of his succeeding volumes. Poetry was coloured by the successive polities under which it flourished, and varied according as these were mainly ecclesiastical and monarchical, or civic and secular. It also varied with its public, which is the most powerful and often the most destructive part of the artist's contemporary environment. In particular, the form and soul of our drama were infinitely altered according as this public was predominantly the people or the Court. In his sketch of the setting and drift of early Tudor poetry Mr Courthope suffers somewhat in proportion. He is debarred from bringing in English prose, save on sufferance, yet he gives a long and pointed account of the masterpieces of Machiavelli, Castiglione, and others, in order to picture types of the Renaissance mind. A valuable scrutiny of the technique of Wyatt and Surrey is followed by a still longer survey, which, even from a historic point of view, need not have been so full, of the dreary Turbervile and Churchyard, who, despite some formal interest, clear he weeds very little for the genius of Spenser and Sidney. But the powers of Mr Courthope can best be Vol. 200.-No. 399.

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judged as we approach the poetry of genius, in its two great species, as they pass before us from Spenser to Milton, and from Marlowe to Ford.

The weak side of a studious, ambitious essay seeking to explain poetry is that, while really doing much, it always has the air of seeming to do more than is possible. The book before us is less a history of poetry than a history of certain impersonal forces which from age to age tended to prescribe its form and aim, to beleaguer it about. They play upon each artist in diverse proportion, fitfully, and with no steady pressure. But there are other forces that lie beyond analysis, namely, those which move the artist; how he shall choose among these floating tendencies in the mind of his time, how he shall combine or alter them, what he shall make of them. Tendencies have no real existence-unless it be for the historian long afterwards-except in the shapes in which the individual mind chooses to submit to them. We only know them through the concrete manifestations from which we then generalise. The mind is not a cauldron in which certain ingredients simmer mechanically, so that a certain result can be expected: a charm is said over them which happily prevents any such thing. Thus an analyst of tendencies, when he comes to the actual master, the actual poem, can only make his diagnosis sound up to the last step but one, unless he also has a measure of the divining sympathy, which is a kind of feminine counterpart of the artist's own creative force.

Hence a writer like Mr Courthope, in dealing with significant secondary figures like Massinger or Drummond, is better than when dealing with larger men; for his analysis carries him up to the very verge of their comparatively narrow ring of personality, and they can be stated in terms of historic tendencies. But the great initiators-Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne-though from one point of view they absorb and express larger elements of historic growth than the others, are not only harder to diagnose from such considerations, because the forces are more intricate, but actually refuse to be stated in such terms, ultimately, at all. Marlowe is seen in clearer light, certainly, as the embodiment of a ruling mood of the Renaissance, the worship of energy, virtù, or, as Mr Courthope calls it, 'will-worship'; but his real