characteristic lies in the form, the voice, he gives to that impulse. And this form and voice are found in the depths of his profoundly original style, his turn of phrase, his peculiar turn of passion. No amount of history can give an account of this; nothing, indeed, can ever express it fully; but the nearest approaches can be made by a fellow-poet, like Mr Swinburne, when writing new poetry, or criticism, which is poetry in all but metre, upon him.

Mr Courthope's scope and restrictions are well seen in the case of Donne, on whom he throws new and true light-the search-light of history, which has never been turned on Donne so clearly before. It is curious with how little sympathy it is done, and how instructive it is nevertheless; for Mr Courthope's analysis of the historic setting is not in the least brain-spun or capricious; it is solidly based, and is charged with learning. Donne is taken out of the region of mere anomaly and miracle in which he is too often left by the critics. In him we trace (the phrasing is our own, as the passages are too long for extract) the habit of the school-divine, logical and dividing, a habit applied equally to the sacred matters of faith and fear, and to the profaner matters of love and lust; the two worlds, sacred and profane, being joined and confounded at every turn by this pervading temper that is applied to them. The course of Donne's thought is traced, perhaps more positively than the vague dates of his poems warrant, through the successive phases of belief, of pyrrhonism or nihilism, and of faith again triumphant; the whole man, in these different phases, being bound together by the intellectual habit, carefully defined, of wit.' Thus Donne is a sensitive mirror of many impulses of his time. He remains a living exponent of what we may call-and Mr Courthope might perhaps accept the phrase the temporary Counter-Renaissance, or re-emergence of mediæval habits of mind after the glow of the Renaissance was spent. All this is admirable; but there is something more, and a passage that we shall quote later from a very different critic, Mr Saintsbury, will supply what is wanting the suggestion of the inner personality of Donne. Flaubert, in his words on Taine, put the point very clearly:

'Il y a autre chose dans l'art que le milieu où il s'exerce et les antécédents physiologiques de l'ouvrier. Avec ce système

là, on explique la série, le groupe, mais jamais l'individualité, le fait spécial qui fait qu'on est celui-là. Cette méthode amène forcément à ne faire aucun cas de talent. Le chefd'œuvre n'a plus de signification que comme document historique. Voilà radicalement l'inverse de la vieille critique de La Harpe. Autrefois, on croyait que la littérature était une chose toute personnelle et que les œuvres tombaient du ciel comme des aérolithes. Maintenant on nie toute volonté, tout absolu. La vérité est, je crois, dans l'entre-deux.' spondance, iii, 196.)

(Corre

We would not saddle Mr Courthope, whose 'system' is much sounder than that which Flaubert criticises, with the whole of the rebuke which he often escapes when he permits himself to give a direct judgment. His words on Herrick make us ask for more of the same kind. He comments on 'The Funeral Rites of the Rose':—

"This exquisiteness of fancy, working on a great variety of subjects-flowers, precious stones, woman's dress, religious ritual, and the like-finds its happiest field in the region of folklore. Shakspeare had already shown the way to that delightful country in the "Tempest," in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Romeo and Juliet." . . . But it may be safely said that none of these creations, not even Shakspeare's description of Queen Mab, surpasses in lightness of touch, or equals in the rich profusion of imagery, Herrick's Euphuistic treatment of the elves' (iii, 263).

The whole of Mr Courthope's survey of seventeenth century verse, of what we have called the CounterRenaissance, and of the re-assertion of the Latin Renaissance in a fresh and more limited shape during Dryden's time, has the virtues and drawbacks that we have intimated. His classification of the labyrinthine schools of verse under various forms of 'wit,' and his characteristically true and deep analysis of wit itself, call for much gratitude. His summing-up of the influences that went to the making of Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and of the equally complex style which could be its only fit expression, is a triumph of his method, of his skill in bringing many historic rays to converge upon one object. On the other hand, his apprehension of many lesser poets remains a little blank; his connoisseurship, or sense of varieties in accent and gesture, is faint. It is best to illustrate from his chapters on the drama, on which he

has spent great care, and which are almost as instructive for what they leave out as for what they say.

6

Mr Courthope's high sympathies deaden, it must be said, his understanding of the drama of remote or anomalous passion, however wonderful its style may be. He is capable of quoting the best passages of Cyril Tourneur, with their sombre strangeness of jewelled phrase, at Tourneur's expense. He can slight the fitful but lofty tragic talent of Middleton without even mentioning the central scenes of The Changeling,' which would have done honour to the author of Measure for Measure.' He administers an official rebuke to Charles Lamb, while commending him in general, for his 'ecstatic' praises of the minor dramatists, on the ground that it raises in the mind an idea of the colossal greatness of all the Elizabethan dramatists, which is by no means sustained when their works are examined organically.' Not only is this to visit the mistakes of foolish readers upon Lamb, whose praises are far more carefully defined and qualified than at first appears; it is also to forget how Lamb was moved to his eloquence by that inebriation with language, and with a passionate situation well presented, from which Mr Courthope may be a professed abstainer, but which none the less is the nearest way to reproduce the exalted moods of the playwrights themselves in their creative hour. It is not unfair, and even refreshing, for the historian to call Marston's 'Antonio and Mellida' a 'jumbled hash of bloody recollections'; but this does not invalidate the strict rightness of Lamb's praise of the prologue to the same play, with its 'passionate earnestness and tragic note of preparation.'

It is right to add that Mr Courthope's want of sympathy is partly due to a motive that is really and purely artistic, and not merely to a certain ethical rigidity. Trained in the classics, he has a real, a sound, and often an offended sense of dramatic structure. Our drama suffers under the application of this test; but suffer it must, and the test is applied with courage. Logic, outline, harmony, consequence-our plays, so often written to be seen and heard, and written under stress, usually fail in these qualities; Shakespeare himself at times fails in them. In English criticism the sense of form and beauty is too often limited to style and expression, and

too seldom extends to outline and harmony. Mr Courthope is always calling aloud for plastic mastery in our drama, and he calls in vain.

6

Some of Mr Courthope's conclusions upon matters of fact and authorship, especially in the case of Shakespeare, are sure to excite discussion. He has the right to his own plan, which is not to load his page with titles, learned apparatus, or discussion of the views of other scholars. But it is not always easy to see how far he has studied, and how far rejected, their views. He names Elze and Ulrici, whose simple-minded moralising of Shakespeare has long been exploded, but he seems to make no use of the contributions of Kreyssig, or Bulthaupt, or Brandes, all of whom would have given him aid. In exegesis he seems to work alone, and to infer easily. He holds that Shakespeare wrote "The Troublesome Reign of King John,' and 'The Taming of a Shrew' (as well as 'The Taming of the Shrew'); that The Tempest,' at all events in its first conception, is a play of the period of the 'Dream,' and is identical with 'Love's Labour Won,' mentioned by Meres; and that he may dismiss Henry VIII' as too 'mechanical' to be considered in a history of Shakespeare's art, saying nothing about the deeply-considered view of many scholars, that part of it is by Fletcher. Reasons of style and diction, which have to be weighed in advancing a new claimant for admission to the Shakespearean canon, do not seem to have been considered in the case of the 'Troublesome Reign' and 'A Shrew'; and the other pleas advanced for them, though too elaborate to be discussed here, hardly carry so great a conclusion. The dislocation of 'The Tempest' from its accepted place not only misinterprets the evidence of language, versification, temper, and subject, but rests upon the frail support of the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour' (1598), in which he refers to storms, stage thunder, and the popularity of 'monsters.' But this prologue, although some argue for its early composition, was first printed in the folio issued by Jonson in 1616. Even were it early, the allusion to monsters is not strong enough to warrant an application to Caliban; and a stage tempest was familiar already in Marlowe.

In judging the drama Mr Courthope steadily applies three principles, which are just and carry him far, He

is on the watch for structure and its absence; he constantly applies the touchstone of a high chivalrous feeling; and thirdly, in tracing the historic pattern, he finds its main theme in the spiritual or moral conceptions that animated the successive schools of playwrights. He has little sympathy with the Marlowesque drama, or seems to admire it unwillingly; but he is right in regarding it, with its concentration on virtù or personal energy desirous and defiant, as a kind of by-product, not really in the main line of dramatic development. And he shows, more clearly than other critics, and even with too much emphasis, how the motive of the old Morality,' namely, the abstract conflict between personifications of good and evil, strikes deep and far into the drama of Jonson, of Massinger, and to some extent of Shakespeare. Mr Courthope's incessant and wavering use of the word 'abstract,' which sometimes means 'remote from life and reality,' and elsewhere suggests moral personifications of virtue and vice, may not be approved. Nevertheless, in spite of the elements from Stoical ethics, which came in to strengthen and ennoble the bare forms of the 'Morality,' it is true that there is in the drama a real continuity of moral topic, appearing under many disguises; so that Massinger, of whom Mr Courthope gives a masterly account, derives by true pedigree, though perhaps not consciously, from the ruder but eminently theatrical forms of art represented in 'Everyman.' To unravel this one thread out of the motley strand of artistic influences that bewilder the student of the drama is a service. The remarks on the nature of melodrama (iv, 233); on the different notions of love in Shakespeare and in Fletcher (iv, 332); on the 'atmosphere of humanity and society' in Shakespeare's comedies (iv, 187); on Ford, whose 'lack of sympathy' in dealing with abnormal passion and abstract curiosity' are pointed out with much insight; and the account of Dryden's 'All for Love' as a Gallicised 'Antony and Cleopatra,' exemplify Mr Courthope's felicity on his own ground. After our many criticisms we prefer to end with another profound piece of analysis, in which the extinction of the chivalrous idea of love is discovered in the work of Dryden.

'Love in the poetry of the Middle Ages reveals itself in two aspects; it is either a platonised reflection of the old